Smileys not showing in excerpt

Small problem.
When i insert a smiley in the post, it shows properly, but it gets removed from the excerpt on the homepage, only text of the post is being shown.

I tried to use Advanced Excerpt to exclude/include what i want in excerpt, but then it shows both smiley and images from the post, and it looks bad.

Is there any manual way of enabling smiley’s in excerpt via theme’s function.php file?

Thanks