Look out, Jerry Seinfeld. You are in Andy Kindler’s cross hairs.

After nearly two decades of delivering his popular State of the Industry speech at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, Mr. Kindler has become known as a fierce ombudsman of comedy, an in-house critic whose scathingly funny annual address is a mix of stand-up, roast and rigorous argument. He wields a hammer (“Adam Carolla is like Hitler if Hitler wasn’t funny”) as well as a switchblade. (About the end of Craig Ferguson’s CBS talk show, he quipped, “He’s going to go out like he came in: barely trying.”)

This year’s speech is on Friday, and Mr. Kindler sounded energized about it in an interview last weekend. He said he would cover Bill Cosby and James Corden but would focus on the controversial interview in which Mr. Seinfeld said college audiences had become too politically correct. “I’ve been studying it like the Zapruder film,” Mr. Kindler said, before chuckling over Mr. Seinfeld’s claim that young people like denouncing racism but don’t know what the word means.

“I love the idea that they don’t know what racism is, but he does because he grew up in ... ,” Mr. Kindler stopped, pausing for dramatic effect, “Massapequa, that hotbed of racial unrest.” Then he shifted from a wry tone to that of a lawyer laying out the facts of the case: “Massapequa is 1.7 percent black. The median income is $100,000 a year. The first black person Jerry met was George Wallace,” the comic.

Mr. Seinfeld’s comments have already received plenty of criticism online, where debates about jokes have a ritualistic quality with the familiar two-step of critics finding punch lines offensive followed by comedians defending themselves by citing the right to free speech. Mr. Kindler often cuts through this tedious dialogue, approaching subjects from an insider’s perspective but without dogma. He has an ear that’s sensitive to hype and a contrarian’s delight in going against the grain, which is why no one is better at poking fun at Louis C. K. That comic’s much-publicized habit of doing new material every year drew Mr. Kindler’s cutting sarcasm. “Louis C. K. was this close to coming up with the unified field theory,” he said in 2012. “Just one more day. One more day. But he had to move on, because everything is fresh and new.”