He was probably best known for being the head writer and co-producer in 1984 of the first six shows of the long-running British satirical television series Spitting Image and for starring in the film This Is Spinal Tap as the band's manager Ian Faith.

For the next five years they worked successfully as a comedy team, appearing at the Cafe Au Go Go in New York with Lenny Bruce, at the hungry i in San Francisco with Nina Simone and at the Shadows in Washington, DC, with various headliners, including Woody Allen.

[citation needed] In the mid-1980s, he decided to devote himself exclusively to writing and in 1987 published Going Too Far, a history of "sick," "black," "anti-establishment" American satire from the 1950s to the 1980s, which featured interviews of some of the chief satirists.

In 1997, Hendra and director Ron Shelton wrote The Great White Hype, a satire of racism in boxing, starring Samuel L. Jackson, Damon Wayans, Jamie Foxx, Jeff Goldblum, and Peter Berg.

He co-conceived and wrote the English dubs of three of the films created by Belgian animator Picha, including The Missing Link (1980), The Big Bang (1987), and Snow White: The Sequel (2007).

[3] In 2004, at the time that his memoir Father Joe was achieving best-seller status, Jessica Hendra, the younger of Hendra's two daughters from his first marriage, submitted an op-ed piece to The New York Times in which she asserted that her father failed to include in his narrative of "deliverance through faith and atonement for his failings" that he had sexually abused her as a young child.

On 1 July 2004, The New York Times published Kleinfield's story,[4] including details of the alleged acts of molestation and interviews with two of Jessica's therapists, three friends, her mother and her husband.

"[3] In the wake of criticism of the paper's decision to publish the story in the absence of tangible proof,[6] New York Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent wrote a detailed examination of the procedures followed by the editorial staff prior to publication.

While acknowledging that Kleinfield was convinced, based on information gathered during his reporting, that Jessica Hendra had indeed been molested, Okrent expressed concern over possible consequences should the charges prove to be false: Even if the preponderant evidence indicates it's true ... doesn't the small chance that it's false outweigh the value of giving readers access to the private miseries of the Hendra family?

[7]In 2005, Jessica Hendra wrote a memoir with USA Today journalist Blake Morrison, How to Cook Your Daughter, in which she repeated her accusations.