(RNS) — I’ve never been a regular viewer of “The Late Show” because I’m usually in bed by 9 o’clock. But I’ve been feeling a growing sense of loss that Stephen Colbert’s last episode airs Thursday (May 21), not for late night television, but for something more serious: We are losing a great American prophet.

I mean that in a technical sense. The prophet figure appears across religious traditions, and not as someone who primarily predicts the future. The prophet Amos wasn’t predicting anything when he said, “Let justice roll down like waters.” He was looking at what was actually happening — the exploitation of the poor, the corruption of the courts, the performative piety of the powerful — and refusing to look away.

Prophets are intermediaries who stand between us and a truth we cannot yet see. They name what is real when institutions that are supposed to protect people are instead protecting power. In this time of political, environmental and tech-driven crisis, we need all the prophets we can find.

Prophets aren’t usually rewarded for what they do. They speak out anyway because the truth had to be said and no one else was saying it. Colbert knows this all too well. When CBS canceled “The Late Show” last summer — just days after Colbert called Paramount’s $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump a “big fat bribe” on air — he looked straight into the camera and said, “They made one mistake: They left me alive. And now the gloves are off.” Colbert used his remaining months to speak, in his own words, “unvarnished truth to power.”

But now that time is up, and we are losing a prophet.

You might be thinking, isn’t this a bit much? Colbert’s a talk show host, not Jeremiah. But after 25 years studying religious ethics, I think comedians are doing some of the most serious moral work in America right now.

There are a couple of reasons why this works. We experience comedians as outside the institutions that have failed us. They aren’t politicians or even clergy. And their platforms mean they can reach millions of people who would never sit through a sermon or watch a Senate hearing on C-SPAN.

But humor also does something other forms of truth-telling can’t. It gets us to see what’s been right in front of our face. Our laughter is the moment of our moral clarity.

Religious thinkers have understood this for a long time. The religious ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in “Discerning the Signs of the Times” that “humor is a prelude to faith, and laughter is the beginning of prayer” because it can hold the irrational, complex messiness of life. Sociologist Peter Berger argued in “Redeeming Laughter” that comedy is a signal of transcendence insofar as it is a crack through which something larger can be seen. And the theologian Harvey Cox, in “The Feast of Fools,” suggested that the capacity for irreverence is an essential part of a serious moral life. The religious studies scholars all understood that the joke is not the opposite of the truth. Sometimes, it is the only way to get others to see it.

Colbert, who has spoken often about being Catholic, is not alone in this prophetic comedic work. Jon Stewart, whom one critic described as “a TV preacher, and shame is his drama,” called Immigration and Customs Enforcement a “well-funded paramilitary group” when politicians wouldn’t. Trevor Noah, a South African who see America’s contradictions with the clarity of an outsider, stood on the Grammy stage and said, “I’m going to enjoy tonight because this may be the last time I get to host anything in this country,” a joke highlighting our harsh immigration policy. And comedian Pete Holmes, who calls himself a “Christ-leaning spiritual seeker,” hosts the podcast, “You Made it Weird,” built around the question: What is the meaning of life?

When Colbert goes off air Thursday, we won’t just lose a late-night host. We’ll lose access to a public figure grounded in a serious moral tradition and willing to tell the truth at real cost to himself. There’s a word for that; we just stopped using it.

So, what does Colbert leave us with? When Dua Lipa asked him on air whether his faith and comedy ever overlap, he said comedy is “funny and sad and funny about being sad,” which is rooted for him in the Catholic conviction that death is not defeat. Fear, he said, is what drives people toward darkness. And so, “No matter what happens, you are never defeated. You must find some way to love and laugh with each other.”

(Liz Bucar is a religious ethicist and professor at Northeastern University and the author of “Beyond Wellness.” She writes the Substack Religion, Reimagined. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)