New York ? Sen. John Kerry’s first political task Tuesday was bantering with Kelly Ripa on “Live with Regis and Kelly” about her greeting him in the hallway before the television show in a ratty Oscar the Grouch T-shirt, her hair in curlers, her hands slick with lotion.

“I never expected to meet you the way I did this morning,” Kerry said as he came on the set of the television station WABC for the nationally syndicated talk show.

“It’s a sight, isn’t it?” shot back Ripa’s co-host, Regis Philbin.

“I’ve embarrassed my family for generations to come,” Ripa said.

Politically, it may have been Kerry’s most important campaign stop of the day — a chance to display his lighter side on a program that reached an average of 4.8 million viewers a day over the last year, according to Nielsen Media Research.

On Monday, Kerry dropped by “The Late Show with David Letterman.” Aides said both visits were aimed at addressing what they call the “likability factor” — the sense identified in recent polls by the Pew Research Center and Zogby International that many voters haven’t warmed up to Kerry on a personal level.

“You’re very handsome, senator,” Ripa said. “Is that inappropriate for me to say?”

“We’re both married, so it’s OK,” Kerry said.

She suggested that Harrison Ford could play him in a movie about the campaign. Kerry blushed and smiled.

And so it went, as the two hosts and the senator from Massachusetts talked about Kerry’s eating habits on the road (“I’m on the starvation plan”), the upcoming football game between Notre Dame, Philbin’s alma mater, and Boston College, as well as the storied baseball rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.

Mike McCurry, a senior adviser to the Democratic presidential candidate, said the two shows appealed to audiences that the campaign wanted to reach: young people, in the case of “Letterman,” and stay-at-home moms, in the case of “Live.” Polls show both audiences are important slices of the undecided vote.

A Pew Research study earlier this year found that 21 percent of voters under age 30 said their primary source of political information came from such late-night comedy shows as “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, “Letterman” and “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno.

That was about equal to the percentage of such voters who said they relied on newspapers or watched network television news to learn about the candidates.