While some jokes are connected to the calendar, like the clown for Halloween, many of them are evergreen. A punch line about the daily goings-on in Washington can get easy laughs from like-minded viewers. But they won’t age well, and Mr. O’Brien, generally speaking, aims for jokes that depend less on the news cycle than his competitors do.

This even extends to how Mr. O’Brien handles politics. While he does an ordinary joke or two about President Trump every night, he also produced one of the most truly daring episodes of political comedy this year, with a September show shot entirely in Israel and the Palestinian territories, one of his many episode-long forays into other cities. Mr. O’Brien floated in the Dead Sea, engaged in some terrible haggling with street vendors and delivered a minute-long history of the area that covered thousands of years.

Much of the special was simply Mr. O’Brien unscripted, making a connection with game strangers and turning that into an amusing scene. But he didn’t only stay light. When he traveled to the West Bank barrier, he bumped into pro-Palestinian activists, who criticized Zionism, describing a Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli settler. He spent most of this awkward but compelling exchange listening, without defensiveness, and then posted the entire 24-minute segment online. Inevitably, his show was criticized for bias, but wading into this dispute, even clumsily, displayed an admirable willingness to take risks.

Earlier this year, there were rumors that “Conan” was shifting to a weekly format, and Lord knows, after being a daily talk-show host since 1993, he has earned the right to a slower schedule. But here’s hoping he sticks around, because more than anyone else on air, he is a reminder that talk-show hosting is an art form deserving respect. The increasing politicization of late-night comedy has been great for ratings, and has helped certain hosts find their voices, but it’s worth examining if it comes at a cost. Comedy doesn’t need to serve a political end to be important.