Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele star in “Key & Peele”

A good comedian knows to leave the stage on a high note. Last month, halfway through the fifth season of "Key & Peele," much-loved comedy duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele announced that this season would be the last. With big ideas and new plans on the horizon, the pair is doing the smart thing and getting the heck out of Dodge long before we’re downright sick of them. A new episode of “Key & Peele” airs Wednesday, Aug. 26, on Comedy Central.

The gentlemen of “Key & Peele” truly know how to do funny, with their winning mixture of wit, irreverence, all-round goofiness and a healthy sprinkling of colorful language thrown in for good measure. It’s the kind of humor that just about anyone can appreciate, and these guys seem to know how to make a video go viral.

Key and Peele met each other in the Chicago improv scene before becoming castmates in the sketch comedy show “MADtv.” They were actually cast against one another so that Fox could pick one black cast member, but their undeniable chemistry got them both on the roster in the show’s ninth season.

That same chemistry led to “Key & Peele,” which launched in 2012 to an audience of more than two million viewers, making it Comedy Central’s highest-rated series premiere since “The Jeff Dunham Show” in 2009. Since then, the show has maintained widespread popularity, averaging well over a million American viewers per episode for the first four seasons. Ratings for the current season have tapered off a little, but it’s certainly not for lack of quality or humor.

Both Key and Peele are the sons of a black father and white mother, and their shared black and mixed-race heritage play a big part in their comedy, as they outlined after their biggest shining moment to date -- winning a prestigious Peabody Award in 2013.

“We set out to make a show that only we could perform,” said Peele in the pair’s Peabody interview. “We’re both mixed [race], and that is very much a part of that voice. ... There’s such a big community of mixed-race people in the world and in this country, and it’s a relatively unexplored world.”

Many of their sketches have a focus on black stereotypes and serious race issues in general -- from slavery to gangs to the Trayvon Martin case -- which the two bite into with an irreverent brand of humor that aims to effectively tear these issues down.

“We really do feel like comedy is important, and we do feel like it’s one of the most valuable tools that we have against injustices in the world,” Peele said in the Peabody interview.

With their stars consistently on the rise, Key and Peele are nothing if not memorable. Their long list of sketches includes a number of favorites that have gone viral and seem to stay funny no matter how many times you watch them. One of the most recognizable characters is Luther, President Obama’s “anger translator,” whose loud and furious tirades tell us what the mild-mannered Obama is really feeling. Key, who plays Luther to Peele’s Obama, even reprised his role for the real president during the White House Correspondents Dinner this past April.

Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele as seen in “Key & Peele”

The East/West College Bowl series of sketches is another favorite. It introduces a roster of increasingly ludicrously named college football players (Ozamataz Buckshank, L’Carpetron Dookmarriot and Beezer Twelve Washingbeard, to name a few) and is 100 percent impossible to watch with a straight face.

Another particularly enduring character is Mr. Garvey, an irate substitute teacher and 20-year veteran of urban education who becomes immediately furious with his white suburban students, whom he believes are being highly disrespectful when they correct his gross mispronunciations of their rather common names during attendance. (“A.A.-Ron” turns out to be "Aaron," earning the hapless boy the label of “insubordinate and churlish”; Denise's correction of “Dee-nice” results in Mr. Garvey busting his clipboard over his knee in rage.)

It was announced in March that Key’s Mr. Garvey will be the subject of a feature film, “Substitute Teacher,” with Peele playing a rival teacher. So though their current series is wrapping up, it’s clearly not the end of the “Key & Peele” world. Key has revealed that the pair also has a “Police Academy” reboot in the works, as well as another show for Comedy Central.

“It was just time for us to explore other things, together and apart,” he told "TheWrap." “I compare it to Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. We might make a movie and then do our own thing for three years and then come back and do another movie.”

Whatever they come up with, it will surely be worth the wait.

With “Key & Peele” now in its last season, you’ll want to soak up everything the hilarious pair has left to offer before moving on to bigger and better things. A new episode of the sketch comedy show airs Wednesday, Aug. 26, on Comedy Central.