A comedian’s jester

Andy Kindler is a 47-year-old stand-up comedian who assesses the relative progress of his career this way: “I’m not in show business, but I can see the campfires of show business burning in the distance.”

This isn’t exactly true. Kindler is not only a recurring character on the long-running CBS hit “Everybody Loves Raymond,” he has become somewhat beloved within comedy circles for withering attacks on the entertainment industry, which each year culminate in a speech called “State of the Industry” at the annual Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal.

This year’s festival, which features current stars and young (and not-so-young) hopefuls, began Thursday and runs through Sunday. Kindler will again be there, delivering “State of the Industry” at a very unfunny time -- 2 p.m. on a Friday -- in an equally unfunny place -- a meeting room at the Delta Hotel. Hopefully the air conditioning will be working.

This is the ninth year Kindler has given the speech, which is like a roast or a manifesto, delivered to fellow comics, writers, talent managers, club bookers and television executives, the comedy cabal that gathers for a week’s worth of drinking and deal making.

In this environment, Kindler is like the Fool in “King Lear,” needling his own industry about its bad sitcoms and reality shows, its breathtaking hubris. The speech now runs almost 90 minutes, much of it too inside to be used anywhere but at the festival.

Last year, for instance, he told a mounting series of jokes all on the theme of Jason Alexander’s decision to do a series of KFC commercials after making millions on the critically acclaimed “Seinfeld.”

“How much money do you need?” Kindler asked reasonably, though not many comics would voice this question onstage. “Does his furnace at home burn Krugerrands? Does he have 8,000 children? Does he have wallpaper made out of million-dollar bills? Does he have a rare disease that requires an IV drip of liquid gold?”

He talked about shows he’d like to pitch to the networks: the reality series “Malarious,” in which comedians are sent to a malaria-infested island (“I’d like to book that one too”). A dating show from a Jewish mother’s perspective, called “Date, Why Don’t You Already?”

A few weeks ago Kindler was in his West L.A. apartment, going over his speech for this year. He had already transferred the jokes from notebooks to the Apple iBook computer he got last year from “Everybody Loves Raymond” executive producer Phil Rosenthal, who handed out the laptops as Christmas gifts to his cast and crew.

“State of the Industry” is developed from sets that Kindler, a fixture at L.A. clubs including M Bar and Largo, does throughout the year. This year, as always, there are sections on Jay Leno (“He’s now outsourcing his monologue jokes to India”; “He shops for his jokes at Fish ‘n’ Barrel”) and on the consistent folly of network executives (“I wish ABC would get out of the TV business and go back to doing what they do best: underpaying theme park employees”).

“I’m not repeating anything I did last year,” he said. In fact, to avoid confusion about what was bad this year versus last year, Kindler dates his jokes. He’d come up with new ways to zing “Last Comic Standing,” the popular NBC reality series that to Kindler dignifies stand-up comedy about as much as a reality show called “Last Scientist Standing” would dignify breakthroughs in science (“I’m sorry, Einstein, great theory, but you’ve been voted out of the laboratory”).

In his apartment, Kindler noted that this year’s speech was made more difficult by the broadcast networks’ scaling back on sitcoms. “There’s so much less comedy now, less to make fun of.” But he would soldier on, even taking on the death of John Ritter, who died suddenly this year while making the ABC sitcom “Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.”

“All the articles were, ‘What’s ABC going to do?’ ” Kindler said of news coverage. “That’s how I thought about it too: My thoughts are with ABC right now. My heart goes out to the ABC family.”

Sitcoms, Kindler said, are so reliably bad that some setups could remain in the speech. Like this one: “I had a root canal earlier this week, and the dentist said it’s going to hurt, but it won’t be as painful as watching an episode of ‘The Tracy Morgan Show.’ ” “Now that’s off [the air] now, right? So I have to insult a different bad show,” Kindler said.

In 1991 Kindler, who is from Queens, N.Y., was featured on the same “HBO Young Comedians Special” that featured Janeane Garofalo and Ray Romano. But Kindler’s not bitter. In fact, a stand-up DVD he recently made is called “I Wish I Was Bitter.” Kindler hopes to sell it to a network or cable channel.

In the past, he’s had sitcom deals that didn’t pan out. He said he tried out for a part in the film “Anchorman,” but his friend Fred Willard got the role.

What saddens Kindler more is that movie comedies have gotten so one-note. So it’s not like he’s missing out on genius. He wonders, what’s the sequel to “DodgeBall” going to be? “Tetherball II: The Unraveling”?

“All these movies that [Ben] Stiller makes, and [Adam] Sandler makes ... this year, I’m just gonna read the different descriptions of them. They’re all basically like ’50 First Dates.’ How is that a movie?”

Kindler was no longer joking. Now he was kvetching. “There’s a whole segment of people who are not going to those movies and are not being serviced. That’s my argument. Not just my dad, but a lot of my friends who would never go to any of those movies. That’s a big market that’s not being serviced.”

He went back to looking over his speech. A few weeks ago, Kindler had tried out some of the jokes at the Improv, where he hosted a show. “Andy Kindler,” comic Zach Galifianakis said, taking the stage after Kindler introduced him.

“Other comics love him,” Galifianakis said, “because he’s unsuccessful.”