A BULL MARKET IN LATE-NIGHT TALK SHOWS

Can we squawk?

TV needs more talk shows like TV needs more beer commercials. So Joan Rivers getting her own talk show opposite NBC’s Johnny Carson on the new Fox Broadcasting Co. network in the fall rates an .00001 on the Richter scale. About half a hayoh .

Most talk shows are places where people who can’t talk spill their guts to people who aren’t listening. “The Tonight Show” has always been good for some late-night giggles, though. It’s the only show that would book Hulk Hogan, Mr. Rogers and Dr. Ruth for the same evening. And although Carson has his detractors, you can’t hold Ed McMahon against him forever.

Besides Johnny, however, there’s also marvelous Merv. David Letterman’s show is sort of talky too, and David Brenner has a syndicated talk show set for fall. Meanwhile, Dick Cavett is talking gobs on USA Cable Network, and such conversing clerics as Jim Bakker and Paul Crouch have “Tonight Show”-style TV pulpits.

And here comes Rivers, who had been the permanent substitute host of “The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson.” Now “The Late Show With Joan Rivers” will be the centerpiece of a fourth network whose syndicated programs will compete with her old network.

As one story goes, Joannie jilted Johnny and Johnny is mad.

But Joannie says she was less the jilter than the jiltee, because NBC wasn’t negotiating a new contract with her.

That’s the story she’s been selling to newspaper interviewers, network morning shows, “Donahue” and David Letterman’s show, along with selling her new book, “Enter Talking,”--while, not coincidentally, also selling “The Late Show With Joan Rivers.”

About the multitude of Joannie-Johnny feud stories? “It’s a media war,” Rivers complained to Jane Pauley on NBC’s “Today” on Monday. Yes, self-promotion on national TV is a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.

The debate continues, and it’s major, epic boffo: Rivers should have left “The Tonight Show”; she shouldn’t have left. She betrayed Johnny; she didn’t betray Johnny. She called him to tell him she was leaving; she didn’t call. He hung up on her; he didn’t hang up. Who--besides Johnny and Joannie--cares?

Can Joannie topple Johnny when so many others have tried and failed? Her 11 p.m. starting time gives her a half-hour jump on Carson. She’ll be up to her ad-libs in one-liners before McMahon can launch his first hayoh . She also promises that some of those “A” guests nixed by the Carson people--Lily Tomlin is a name mentioned--will turn up on her show.

If Rivers beats or even dents Carson, though, it won’t be because of her guests. Talk shows are host versus host. Cavett’s old ABC talk show threw a dazzling array of guests against Carson, to no avail.

Rivers is wickedly funny, but she’s bucking tradition. Carson always rises to the occasion when he seems most vulnerable--witness his most recent challenger, the heavily hyped “Thicke of the Night.” Alan Thicke might have found a better anti-Carson strategy than singing songs dressed as Prince.

There are only two clear winners here. One is Gary Shandling, the comic hired by NBC to fill out Rivers’ guest-host term on the Carson show. The other is ABC’s “Nightline.”

With Carson and Rivers splitting the talk-show audience, to say nothing of Brenner, the audience share for “Nightline” is bound to zoom. And can that Ted Koppel fella tell a joke!

No talk-show host is less like Joannie and Johnny than Cavett. Sitting in on his USA Cable talk show is like eavesdropping on two people whispering in a library.

Tuesday night’s hour interview with Mary Tyler Moore (to be repeated at 1 a.m. tonight and 6 p.m. Sunday) was classic Cavett. He quoted Moss Hart, Robert Redford, Carl Reiner, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Hildegarde Neff, Cloris Leachman, Bette Davis, Gore Vidal, John Cheever, a stagehand and Moore herself.

Cavett has his own scattershot agenda. When Moore spoke critically about her failed sitcom this season (“I thought we all had an understanding of what it was we were trying to do, but I was mistaken”), he flew off to something else rather than follow up.

He seldom asks a straightforward question, preferring obliqueness. When he began hemming and hawing over asking Moore about the suicide of her son and her treatment for excessive drinking, she cut him off with this:

“You sound just like the guy who comes over to me in the restaurant while I’m eating dinner and says, ‘I hate to be rude while you’re eating, but will you sign this?’ OK, Dick,” she added, with a trace of irritation, “ask me about the tragedies.”

He never did--directly. In fact, for two people who seemed to be chatting so intimately, they imparted very little information. The host had a different perspective, though.

“You’re even better than I thought,” Cavett told Moore at the end of the hour. “Did I say that believably . . . with conviction?” Say goodnight, Dick.

Today’s third subject is his own talk show. No guests required.

Except that Howard Cosell isn’t appearing much on TV these days. This month Cosell began writing a twice-weekly syndicated column on sports; hence he’s now doing his talking in print.

No matter the medium, though, his focus remains unchanged. In his first three columns, Cosell used “I” 35 times. He used “my” nine times and “me” twice, as in: “Listen to what he said to me.”

The latter appeared in Sunday’s column on baseball commissioner Peter Ueberroth’s anti-drug campaign. The column ran 580 words, only 263 of which were Cosell’s. The rest of the column was a direct quote of Ueberroth, in which he stated--unchallenged by Cosell--that drugs were a greater threat to society even than world hunger and nuclear proliferation. Tell that to Chernobyl.

Cosell’s second column, about National Football League recruits who tested positive for drugs, was the best of the three, even though he typically congratulated himself for his reporting on the subject.

His opening column, though, was Howard at his most horrid, as he explained to those interested--half a dozen readers, maybe--why he was now slumming in print:

“It matters little to me if my voice is heard on television, or radio or in newspapers. Like Sisyphus, my rock is my thing.” Sisyphus, as all sports fans know, was a character in Greek mythology condemned to push a heavy rock up a hill. Each time he got to the top, the rock fell and he had to start again.

Howard was obviously intimating that Sisyphus would have made a good drop-back quarterback had he been able to stay in the pocket and throw long.

Cosell, noting that he’d been deposed by both sides in the USFL antitrust suit against the NFL, added: “(I) will therefore be under legal constraints in my reporting. But I promise you that within the bounds of legal propriety I will never sacrifice a journalistic principle. Don’t forget: I never played the game. I never will.”

Whew! What a relief.

Did I say that believably . . . with conviction?