Is it hard to get your own show?

Amy Sedaris isn't particularly impressed with a lot of the people who have their own television shows these days.

The host of "Make 'Em Laugh," a history of comedy that is repeating on PBS (Thursdays, 7 p.m., Ch. 7), didn't have any predictions about the future of comedy. But she isn't necessarily very high on the present of TV comedy.

"I don't know where comedy is heading. It seems to be like anybody can get on TV right now, or anybody can do their own show," Sedaris said. "I don't know — it just seems like it's not a real skill.

"You see those comedians on the documentary, and you can see how hard they worked at it. And they sacrificed everything to do it. And I don't know if that's the case today."

She's not talking about everyone on TV today — not by a long shot. Sedaris specifically mentioned David Letterman and Craig Ferguson as two present-day TV comedians whom she finds "very funny."

"I mean, like Jon Stewart and (Stephen) Colbert, they use their skills, and they work really hard. But I'm just talking about some of the other people you see on TV," she said, declining to elaborate any more specifically on who those "other people" are.

One thing seems certain, however. Sedaris won't be hosting her own talk show anytime soon. Or ever.

"Oh, I would be horrible at that, I think," she said, adding that — while she's a great talk-show guest, no one has ever asked her to be a talk-show host.

"No, no. Obviously, no, they haven't," Sedaris said.

SEDARIS HAS DONE an enormous amount of TV guest work — not just on talk shows, but on series including "Rescue Me," "The Closer," "My Name Is Earl," "Sesame Street," "Law & Order: SVU," "Ed," "Monk," "Sex and the City" and more.

She's also starred in a pair of series — the sketch-comedy show "Exit 57" (12 episodes in 1995-96) and the decidedly offbeat "Strangers with Candy" (30 episodes in 1999-2000).

And she's still trying to get a new show off the ground — something she's collaborating on with Paul Dinello, another alumni of "Exit 57." (Among the other stars of that show was Colbert of "The Colbert Report.")

Not surprisingly, she wasn't overly forthcoming about what, exactly, the show will be about.

"It will be, you know, a half-hour long," Sedaris said. "But no, there isn't enough there to really (talk about) because it could change so much.

"So I would like to be a nudist, so maybe that way, it would go to cable. Because it's funny to see naked people. Hilarious.

"See, if I played someone older and I was naked, great. Someone might say, 'She's got a great body for someone who is 65.' But if I had to play my own age, 36, then they'd be, like, 'You've got to get to a gym.' "

Clearly, the show will not be about a nudist.

And, by the way, Sedaris isn't really 36, either. She's 48.

e-mail: pierce@desnews.com