TELEVISIONSnow Job: If you didn’t think “Saturday...

TELEVISION

Snow Job: If you didn’t think “Saturday Night Live” was funny this weekend, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George R. Pataki can explain why. The two Republicans--who opened Saturday night’s show--joked that after the city’s worst blizzard in more than 40 years the cast had to help shovel and salt snow-covered streets. “So, folks, if you find the jokes are only marginally funny, cut ‘em some slack,” Giuliani said. Added Pataki: “If a sketch doesn’t have an ending, well, so what?” The two also had a mock quarrel over who should open the NBC show, then compromised and did it together.

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Not Nickelodeon: A Miami commissioner who tried to tune in cartoons for his young daughters to watch on a City Hall TV set was outraged when he came across the steamy Playboy Channel, the Miami Herald reported Monday. “I knew Nickelodeon hadn’t gotten that bad,” said Commissioner Joe Carollo, who has asked that explicit cable channels be banned from City Hall. Carollo demanded an investigation but no one has ‘fessed up to ordering the Playboy Channel subscription.

MOVIES

Wayans Set to Score: Marlon Wayans, red-hot at the box office, plays the ghost of a basketball player who comes back to help his team in his next project. Wayans, No. 2 at the weekend box office with the spoof “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood,” which he co-wrote and co-produced, will film “The Sixth Man” for Mandeville Films, according to a spokesperson for Walt Disney Studios, which will distribute. The cameras are expected to start rolling April 15. “Don’t Be a Menace” was a Wayans family film for Island Pictures and was released by Miramax. It sold an estimated $7.8 million in tickets its first weekend out.

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Keiko Chows Down: Keiko the whale, star of the movie “Free Willy,” is thriving in his new home at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, Ore., and handlers say the evidence is in his appetite: The mammalian star ate 100 pounds of fresh fish Jan. 8, the day after his 19 1/2-hour plane trip from his old and cramped home in a Mexico City amusement park. By Friday, the 7,000-pound whale was eating 200 pounds of fish. Handlers hope to increase the intake to 300 pounds. They also hope some day to be able to release Keiko back to the wild, but some experts doubt that will happen. “The risk of introducing disease and transfer of behavioral traits are too large,” said Robin Baird, a killer-whale researcher from British Columbia.

ART

Art Loan Protested: More than 200 Taiwanese demonstrated in Taipei Sunday to urge the island’s largest museum not to lend 400 of its masterpieces to the United States, saying they are too fragile to travel. The National Palace Museum keeps the treasures, which were moved out of China by Taiwan’s Nationalist government in 1949 after it lost a civil war to the Chinese communists. The museum had planned a tour starting March 12 and spanning 13 months in four museums--New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

POP/ROCK

Hard Austin Night: Bruce Springsteen’s latest album features songs about life on the streets. But you won’t find a song about the 100 homeless people in Austin, Texas, who camped out for tickets to his concert. The homeless were shuttled to nine locations Friday night to buy the $30 tickets for companies that resold them for as much as $400. The homeless people were offered as much as $50 each to stay in line overnight and buy the tickets in the morning. “I think it’s wrong because I don’t think the homeless people understand how bad they’re being used,” attorney Steve Boney, who waited for tickets Friday, told the Austin-American Statesman. But Jay Hill, who works for Ticket City, which paid about five homeless people to stand in line for tickets, said: “It’s free enterprise. That’s what America is based on.” Springsteen, whose Austin concert is Jan. 25, is currently touring in support of his album “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

QUICK TAKES

James Gammon, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, Amy Madigan, Bill Pullman and Alfre Woodward will present a premiere reading of a play, “L-PLAY,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Beth Henley Feb. 3-4 to benefit the Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave. Tickets are $100, including a light meal afterward. . . . When Wayne Newton steps on the stage of the Desert Inn’s Crystal Room tonight, it will mark his 25,000th Las Vegas appearance, a record for any performer in the Nevada gambling town.