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He confessed that his teenage son, Dante, had lobbied for the day off from school, saying that if a 16-year-old did not want a snow day, "there'd be something wrong with him."

And when asked how many layers of clothing he had worn on a numbingly cold day, the mayor of New York City provocatively unzipped his windbreaker and struck a coquettish pose. "Do you go want me to go further?" Bill de Blasio teased.

Faced with the first major test of his two-day-old mayoralty, Mr. de Blasio, in a series of snow-related appearances on Friday morning, was by turns joking and serious, assertive and playful. It was a stark change from the button-down tone of his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, who presided over emergencies with a just-the-facts gravity.

A longtime political operative, Mr. de Blasio emerged early from his rowhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a shovel to clear his own sidewalk, a ritual he said he had done for years.

"Get low, scrape a little," he instructed a television crew, demonstrating with his own shovel. "Rise up with your knees."

Later, at a news conference at a sanitation depot in Woodside, Queens, Mr. de Blasio, in baggy bluejeans, the windbreaker and no necktie announced to New Yorkers that the city's cleanup operation was running smoothly.

"It would have been nice to talk about how to handle a snowstorm in an abstract exercise, but we didn't get to do that," he said to the sanitation commissioner, John Doherty, a temporary holdover from the Bloomberg administration. "We got the real thing."

There were some slip-ups. After Mr. de Blasio suggested that New Yorkers dial 911, which is reserved for emergency calls, to report snow issues, he immediately stopped to correct himself. "Let me retake that one," he said, with a sheepish smile. (The correct number to call is 311, he noted.)

And the mayor made it clear that he was not yet accustomed to some of the demands his new office entails.

After describing a predawn conference call with his schools chancellor to decide whether to close schools, Mr. de Blasio admitted he had never presided over a 4 a.m. meeting before.

"I was one of the most informed people in New York City at 4 a.m. this morning," Mr. de Blasio said, with a touch of pride.

At least one wag on Twitter replied: "He should be."