'The View' for Whoopi: Windy With a Chance Of Meatballs

Shut up, Babs! Knock it off, Joy! Put a sock in it, Elisabeth!

Whoopi Goldberg, the Oscar-winning comedy queen, tried to debut on the syndicated talker "The View" yesterday morning, but she only barely got a word in edgeways, what with evil stepsisters Barbara Walters, Joy Behar and Elisabeth "LookatmeI'mpreggersagain" Hasselbeck hogging the microphone and mugging for the camera.

Whoopi is the new moderator, taking over where Meredith Vieira left off when she abdicated to take over for Katie Couric on NBC's "Today" show. In between Vieira's exit and Whoopi's debut was The Dark Year, when Rosie O'Donnell sat in the moderator chair behind the show's slick new plexiglass desk, haranguing token conservative Elisabeth and turning the fluffy chic-chat show into her bully pulpit to rail against Donald Trump, Kelly Ripa and whatever else had her knickers knotted.

But after just one season, Rosie and the plexiglass desk are gone. Whoopi's in, the comfy pine drop-leaf table is back and the studio is bathed in warm yellow hues.

Only something went wrong right away.

Whoopi kept getting shouted down by the others.

We won't know until later today how many people watched her debut. But if it's anything like the crowd that checked out Rosie's first day on the job, it'll come in somewhere between 4 million and 5 million viewers.

Behar, the alleged in-house comic, started right off yakking about how she was sick for a couple of weeks and, to pass the time, she imagined that her on-air colleagues also were sick. Elisabeth declared she'd never do anything so insensitive; Joy snapped that that she wishes she could get pregnant like Elisabeth, so can it.

Elisabeth went on to discuss her new "bangs-and-boobs" look. Babs interrupted to trump them both.

"I have a message to give to you from, just so happens, from the mayor of this city of New York," she simpered. "It's really to me," she told Whoopi, "but it's about you."

Dear Barbara,

When Rosie left I thought we had an understanding that I was next in line, but the phone never rang. Goldberg -- Bloomberg -- you must have gotten confused and we look so alike.