Heeeeeere’s Jon: MTV’s New Talker : Television: Jon Stewart, former host of ‘You Wrote It, You Watch It,’ now finds comic material in America’s pop culture.

“When you’re working on a new show, you completely lose your perspective on the world,” confides Jon Stewart, the compulsively satiric host of an MTV talk show that debuted this week.

“Moscow is burning, Somalia is falling apart and I’m dancing around because we’ve booked the Olsen twins.”

“The Jon Stewart Show,” which airs Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays at 10 p.m., is a sampling of pop-culture Zeitgeist-- from Soup Dragon-like bands to nutty animal bits to interviews with sports figures, movie stars and the twin sisters of ABC’s “Full House.”

It may be playful, Stewart earnestly declares, revving up for another of his countless “gotchas,” but “we don’t want to only entertain! We want people to learn from the show! At the end, I’ll come out and tell everyone to recycle.”

Trust us: Don’t expect any tete - a - tetes with Brent Scowcroft or Susan Sontag.

Stewart, who is reluctant to admit to being 28 (“They might ship me off to VH-1”) is not exactly swimming in flop sweat, but acknowledges a touch of anxiety. There are so many talk shows on the air now, he says, the hosts “are starting to interview each other.”

It’s an awesome responsibility to have the fortunes and futures of the 25 people who work on the show (“four people just make sandwiches”) riding on him: He segues into an imaginary scene years down the road in which a tattered, rheumy bum grabs him by the lapels and hisses, “I was your segment producer and you ruined me !”

On the plus side, he doesn’t have to wear a tie and he gets to sit down on the job. Being the boss is better than opening for Sheena Easton in Atlantic City, bombing with jokes about how masturbation beats playing the slots (“at least it pays off every time”). It’s also an improvement over his $119-a-week post-college insect-collecting job in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey separating male mosquitoes from females (“Only the females bit”) to monitor encephalitis while chiggers bored into his flesh.

“I’ve had an amazing amount of (lousy) jobs,” says Stewart, who is not unaware that even his most recognizable venture to date--as host of MTV’s viewer-participation show “You Wrote It, You Watch It”--sometimes sagged for the want of better viewer-generated ideas.

Though juiced up by imaginative productions, viewer contributions were often remarkably lame: Someone passed gas in class; a woman broke up, then got back together with a boyfriend; someone laughed so hard a piece of licorice oozed out of their nose. These are plots?

“You should see the ones we didn’t use,” says Stewart, grimacing. “We got scads and scads of letters about people vomiting on animals.”

Stewart was born in Manhattan to Donald and Marian Leibowitz, and raised in Lawrence, N.J., outside Trenton. (He exchanged his last name for his middle one “to escape from the law.”)

Divorced while Stewart was in grade school, his father has since remarried and started a new family. The paterfamilias may not have successfully communicated unconditional love and acceptance to his wise-cracking son, who paints a perverse and questionably surreal picture of his dad in his comedy acts.

“Most of the alcoholic and cross-dressing stuff is trumped up,” the comedian generously admits. When Stewart achieved a lifelong dream of being booked on the David Letterman show, he says his father greeted the good news by musing, “I always thought they picked more experienced people.”

Likewise creatively colored is the Peck’s bad-boy picture Stewart paints of himself. “I was a good kid,” he insists, claiming to have been president of his high school honor society and a respectable member of the school soccer team. “I’m not nearly as maladjusted as I probably seem.”

After earning a psychology degree at William and Mary College, Stewart bummed around New Jersey, working as a bartender in hard-core rock clubs and giving blood in his capacity as an insect-collection specialist. Commencing a career as a stand-up comic, he eventually landed gigs hosting “Short Attention Span Theater” and “Stand Up and Deliver” on the old CTV and HA! cable channels. His MTV gig followed, just at the time producers seemed to have run out of sitcoms for stand-up comedians and began plugging them into talk shows.

An unabashed fan of Letterman, Stewart made an unsuccessful bid for the “Late Night” spot filled by Conan O’Brien.

“I felt bad when a lot of that ‘Conan Who?’ stuff came out. They said he’s ‘unknown.’ Well, how known do you have to be to deserve a shot as a talk-show host?” says Stewart. “Am I unknown? Not to the mosquitoes of New Jersey!”