The scene is a hauntingly familiar one: A white police officer stalks an unarmed black man in a dark alley and slams the man’s head into the open door of his patrol car.

But then, rather than being taken into police custody, the man is led through a magical door to the sunlit streets of a utopia called Negrotown, whose black populace serenades the visitor about its city, where “you can walk the street without getting stopped, harassed or beat” and “you can wear your hoodie and not get shot.”

This comic sketch is one of many that have made “Key & Peele,” the Comedy Central series created by and starring Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, a television program that is uniquely calibrated to the current U.S. moment, when real-life examples of racial polarization and conflict are ubiquitous, but opportunities in pop culture to process these divisions are rare.

It will be a bittersweet moment when this sketch comedy series concludes its final season on Sept. 9, after three years of fixing its satirical lens on stereotypes and social injustices. In its absence, there may be no alternative that so frankly addresses these enduring prejudices and disparities, especially at a moment when America’s racial divide has taken center stage in the national discourse.

The loss of “Key & Peele” is palpable for viewers who believe that a socially conscious comedy sketch can reach a mass audience in ways that eloquent speeches and organized protests cannot. Through the safety of television, our national, nonjudgmental watering hole, provocative ideas about race can be delivered with a smile rather than a sermon.

What the history of black comedy illustrates, said Patrisse Cullors, a social activist and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, is that “our lives have been so traumatic that all you can do is either laugh or cry, and laughter can be a source of resilience.”

But, Cullors said, “if you can make more than just your community laugh about social ills, you can advance culture.”

The comedy of “Key & Peele,” she said, “pokes fun at a system that has been in place for centuries against black folks and turns it inside out, and makes nonblack people really have to look at it as well.”

“It’s a way to challenge social norms and the ways we relate to one another,” she said.

Key, 44, and Peele, 36, who are biracial, say they are ending the show by mutual agreement for the least complicated of reasons: They want to pursue other projects.

They are ambivalent about the outsize expectations placed upon their show, which received an Emmy nomination for variety sketch series and earned Key, a nominee for supporting comedy actor, a place performing alongside President Barack Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April.

Key and Peele said in a recent interview that they do not approach their comedy sketches with the deliberate intent of educating viewers on racial strife or bias.

“That is the prism through which we see the world,” Key said, “so we don’t know how to do the work in another way.”

However, they recognize the crucial role that “Key & Peele” plays by giving voice to the concerns of the black segment of its audience and providing white viewers with a humorous platform to confront their ignorance.

“Institutional racism in this country is undeniable to us,” Peele said. “People need to be talking about the ways the system is skewed. We want to use our ability to make people laugh to allow them to talk about it.”

Although the show is not limited solely to racial issues, some of the sketches are direct responses to real-life people and scenarios: One that followed the death of Trayvon Martin imagines Peele walking through a suburban neighborhood, protected by a sweatshirt with a white person’s face printed on the hood.

A recurring bit casts Key as Luther, a special anger translator to Obama (played by Peele), who speaks all the blunt, vehement and furious things the president cannot allow himself to articulate.

Other sketches offer close observations of everyday figures: a scene about two black students who become rivals when one seeks to join an a cappella group in which the other is the only black member, or about the social phenomenon of “code switching,” where people seem to speak differently among members of their own ethnic group.

Peele said he and Key could not help but find humor in the tensions of a culture where “some things never change.”

“When Obama was elected, there was this mythology that, OK, we’re over the racist thing — this is a postracial world,” Peele said. “And now, obviously, we’ve uncovered why that’s not true.”

Key and Peele, who broke through on the Fox sketch series “Mad TV,” have found a diverse audience with their Comedy Central series, and the Internet has exploded their reach.

Their TV series is watched by an average of 1.2 million people, according to Comedy Central, but their videos have been streamed more than 72 million times in the first four weeks of its current season. By one Nielsen metric, the show’s viewership is 74 percent white.

For the wider audience hungry for culture that puts racial issues prominently in the foreground, it is particularly vexing that the comedians would choose this delicate time to make their imminent (though not permanent) departure.

“These voices are so needed, and when they’re not there, you really feel it,” said Donovan X. Ramsey, a fellow at Demos, a public policy organization that works in part to promote racial equality.