If you haven’t heard about him before, you should know about Andy Kindler, a comic the New York Times profiled last week who is near-legendary in the industry for mocking his colleagues:

Among those things in past years have been a joke-by-joke deconstruction of a Robin Williams HBO special and an offer of $1 million to anyone who could provide “footage of Whoopi Goldberg being humorous.”

But Mr. Kindler’s favorite target by far each year is Jay Leno, whose dominance of the late-night ratings at the expense of David Letterman he sees as a triumph of mediocrity over true comedy genius.

This year he focused on Mr. Leno’s role in the Michael Jackson trial. “The judge put a gag order on Jay Leno,” he told the crowd. “If I knew that was possible, I would have spent the last 10 years down at the courthouse.”

Needless to say, no matter how important such a booking may be to a comedian’s career, Mr. Kindler has never been on the “Tonight” show, and he said he wouldn’t accept an invitation if he received one. (A “Tonight” spokeswoman did not respond to messages asking for comment.)

Nor is he eager for more sitcom work. He calls himself a fan of the format itself and acknowledges that well-written sitcoms like “Everybody Loves Raymond” do occasionally make it onto the air. But he phrased his thoughts on the current state of television comedy in the form of a hypothetical question: “Should I go out for a guest role on ‘Will & Grace’ or should I hang myself? It’s a dilemma.”

Ben Fritz, my friend and former Spinsanity co-editor, worked with Kindler on a pilot for AMC recently, and (in my biased opinion) it was extremely funny. What’s strange is that even though celebrity snark is popular on blogs, it’s rare on TV outside of the Daily Show or late-night talk show monologues because people are so scared to make enemies. Kindler is fearless in his mockery (see his diatribes against Leno above), yet he’s likable while he does it — a hard combination to pull off. So tell your favorite cable channel to put him on the air!

PS If I haven’t mentioned it recently, Ben, who writes for Variety, also co-edits a satirical entertainment news website called Dateline Hollywood that is consistently more clever than The Onion (now sadly moribund). One of their pieces just got picked up on Gawker today.