TALK ABOUT A GRUDGE MATCH . . . ! ! !

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Gabbed about, written about, snickered about and fumed about, “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers” finally blew in on KTTV Thursday night, blistery and blustery, futzy and klutzy, more glitz than ritz, more razzle than dazzle.

It was like seeing 60 minutes of Mary Lou Retton’s teeth.

In an outpouring of stage-manipulated joy, the studio audience gave Rivers an orchestrated spontaneous standing ovation. In familiar fashion, she answered by clapping like a seal.

Remember?

Rivers quit as permanent substitute host for “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” on NBC to head her own hour talk show with the new Fox Broadcasting Co. Johnny got mad. Joan pouted. It was all over the papers and TV, with the media building this late-night clash between Carson and Rivers into a Godzilla grrrrrrudge match. In Los Angeles and most cities, though, she airs at 11 where her only talk show competition is David Brenner’s new half-hour “Nightlife” (on KCOP), and she overlaps only the first 30 minutes of Carson.

Unfortunately for newsnicks, Rivers’ arrival has bumped the KTTV 11 p.m. news to midnight.

Back to Thursday night’s show and Rivers’ Big Name guests--rock stars David Lee Roth and Elton John, tittery Pee-wee Herman and Cher--booked to attract the younger crowd. Carson countered Thursday with Richard Pryor and the usually abusive, elusive Sean Penn.

Rivers has no straight-lining “yes” man a la Ed McMahon. But she has the rest of the package, a “Tonight Show-y” set, a band led by Mark Hudson and electronic applause signs that must have blown their fuses. The audience acted like it was being repeatedly goosed or jabbed by cattle prods.

There was Dirty Talk.

After mentioning that WXNE in Boston had “banned” her show, Rivers held up four fingers and said: “So pick a finger, WXNE.”

“That’s typical Joan Rivers,” WXNE operations director Dick Beach said Friday. The decision to pass on Rivers was made by WXNE’s present owner, the Christian Broadcasting Network. But the station has been all but sold to Fox, pending FCC approval. “We plan to start airing her show in December or January as soon as the sale goes through,” Beach said. “I wish we had it now.”

There was Ooze Talk.

Rivers must have set a modern TV record for saying “incredible,” and never have so many guests, described as a “living legend,” graced a single talk show.

There was Clothes Talk.

With David Lee Roth, Elton John, Pee-wee Herman and Cher on the bill, Rivers’ show looked like pre-Halloween.

“What do you wear in private life?” she asked that legendary dresser David Lee. “As little as possible,” he said.

Rivers sensed she was onto a hot topic. “What do you wear at home?” she asked Elton John, who was in black tails and wearing his hair in a modified George Washington with an enormous black satin bow at the rear of his head. “Ball gowns,” he replied.

She asked Cher what she wore around her kids, and what her kids wore and, well, it was that kind of show. You had the feeling that if the Pope showed up, Rivers would ask him the same question.

The ever-mugging David Lee, Cher, Elton and Pee-wee Herman, a sort of third-rate Ed Grimley who’s become this season’s tiptoeing Tiny Tim, had nothing much to say, but said it anyway. They were there to be stars, not make sense, and they fulfilled their roles.

This was routine who-needs-it? TV, occasionally lifted above the ordinary when Elton John went to the piano and sang.

If nothing else, though, “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers” jumped with Joan and her guests often projecting the kind of enormous energy that made Thursday night’s Carson show seem like a wake. He blew in like a breath of stale air.

As Rivers was talking to Cher, Carson was trapped in a bottomless hole, doing an awful chicken bit that grew worse by the second. Yes, Carson had Pryor, who explained why he was so thin and how he felt about reaching 45. And he had Penn, painfully getting through an interview that Carson had to draw from him practically by Caesarean.

It seemed as if we were watching a meeting of retired accountants. There was just nothing happening.

At one point, Carson said he thought he could never be as funny as Pryor, and Pryor disagreed. “Johnny, you are funny,” he said. “Nobody in the world can do what you do. You come out here, man, and the jokes don’t work . . . and you have the intuitiveness and . . .”

The description was accurate, of course. But here was an entire hour that didn’t work, one that seemed pale, musty and tired at a time when Carson needed to soar.

The battle is still young. There have been lots of pretenders to the late-night throne that Carson has occupied for so many years, many riding the same gusts of hype that are now carrying Rivers. Inevitably, they fail, though, and the smart money has to be on Carson this time, too.

In his opening monologue, he told a joke about all the big match-ups of the week: Reagan versus Gorbachev, the Mets versus the Astros “and me versus ‘The Honeymooners: The Lost Episodes.’ ”

His omission of Rivers was a sharp jab. Was he that sure of her, that confident, or like everyone else on these kinds of shows, was he just talking?

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