HESTON JOKES ON NBC; PHILIPS ON HBO

Charlton Heston says he offered historical perspective to the staff of “Saturday Night Live” when they met, but it dealt not with “Ben Hur,” but with Caesar--as in Sid.

Heston, who made his name playing heroic figures in screen epics, will try his hand as guest host of SNL on Saturday.

“It’s a rare chance to kid around a little,” Heston said in an interview. “I’ve spent most of my life playing these formidable fellows who are busy leading the Jews out of bondage or painting the Sistine ceiling, and those fellows, they’re too busy to make jokes.”

Heston, who now stars on ABC’s prime-time soap “The Colbys,” said he had gone over one night to observe the SNL writers’ meeting.

“They were at great pains to explain it to me the way they went about it, and I said, ‘I think you lack some historical perspective.’ In the ‘50s I did Sid Caesar’s show about eight times when it was really much the same kind of show.

“The way they put it together was precisely similar,” he said. “Then they didn’t have to call it ‘Sid Caesar Live,’ because everything was live, or just about everything.”

Heston said when he did Sid Caesar, the writing staff included Neil Simon, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner.

“Caesar was extraordinarily gifted at doing double talk that sounded like Italian or German or French or Japanese, and they would do an ‘Italian’ movie,” he said. “It was all gobbledygook, but it sounded like Italian, and the guest star always got to be one of the guys in it.

“And even though you were not, as I was not, gifted in making that stuff up, Reiner and Brooks and those people threw off so much stuff--it really was different every day--you didn’t have to make up your own double talk, you just listened to it and did their castoffs, and I loved doing that.”

“The Colbys” concluded its season with a cliffhanger episode Wednesday. The show has done poorly in the ratings, but Heston said, “I’m sure it will” return next fall.

If you think comedian Emo Philips is weird when you watch him flap and contort his way through his act, you ought to try going to a restaurant with him.

Philips, always in character, draws attention even in New York. He’s tall, rail-thin, with wide eyes and a Prince Valiant hairdo cut ragged across his forehead. His clothes look like they came off the rack at the Salvation Army.

The waitress asks if he will be ordering any food. “No, thanks. I just had stomach surgery,” he fibs in his childlike voice.

Philips has been successful on the nightclub circuit and on “Late Night With David Letterman.” He can be experienced by another audience on Home Box Office cable beginning Saturday in a one-man “On Location” show, filmed last year at the Hasty Pudding Theater in Cambridge, Mass. (The hourlong program, subtitled “Emo,” airs at 10 p.m. Saturday, and again Tuesday at 10:30 p.m., with additional dates in April.)

Philips presents himself as a hip geek, and the style is the gimmick. His jokes are funny, but traditional. In a different setting, they could be delivered with punch-line punctuation from the lounge drummer.

Hasty Pudding, Harvard’s satirical theater troupe, gave him a stage decorated in Roman Empire. The crowd was collegiate.

He tells the audience he went to college. “My parents threw quite a going-away party for me, according to the letter.”

His father said, “I’m going to miss you.” He replied, “Well, now that I took that sight off your rifle.”

He tried to get a New York Public Library card, but the clerk said he had to prove he was a citizen of New York--”so I stabbed him.”

At one point he absent-mindedly puts his entire jacket in his pants pocket.

His sexual humor can be mean. He vamps around the stage, recalling his first girlfriend. “I don’t want to say she was loose. I think the term now is ‘user friendly.’ ”

But he also gears his humor to the audience. He calls a physics major up on stage to do a joke about atom smashing. Later, he leans against a decorative pillar. “Imagine me, only a stone’s throw away from Harvard. Somehow it seems strangely--ionic.”

“The bulk of the show will deal with my attempts to reach out with my philosophy to all the wonderful viewers of HBO, just to try to help them live a better life,” Philips says in an interview.

“See, I want people to be able to watch my show and then afterward say to themselves, ‘Well, we got that over with.’ ”