Here's a short (about one minute) video postcard I shot yesterday morning while walking around Jerusalem. Please forgive the image degradation—an unavoidable (at least to my knowledge) result of compressing files for the Web.

IMPOLITE LAUGHTER

A joke makes a hole that the truth can whistle through. —Japanese proverb

While I don’t love the preposition at the end of the above sentence, I find this notion difficult to dispute when encountering deft comic writing—in print, on stage, or on screen—that manages some sort of social commentary. That’s “Arab Labor” (“Avoda Aravit”), an Israeli TV sitcom that screened, in two consecutive episodes, as part of the Jerusalem International Film Festival last night.

As its provocative title suggests, this show deals with the socioeconomic position of Arab Israelis, who are economically less well off than Israeli Jews. Its comic sensibility is quite a bit like “Seinfeld”; one Web article compares the show’s main character, Amjad Alayan (Norman Issa), to Seinfeld’s George Constanza (Jason Alexander). But “Arab Labor” is about something more substantial than urbanite neuroses—namely, racism, ethnic stereotyping, socioeconomic inequality, religion, and virtually every other force sowing divisions into Israeli society today.

How does the show get away with broaching such sensitive subjects? Every group depicted is caught in the act of stereotyping as well as living up to a stereotype to some degree. Here's a clip:

I can’t think of a single U.S. TV show that has ventured so boldly into this social terrain. I’m not a huge TV watcher to begin with, but the best I can come up with are those sitcoms in which race-based cultural clashes occasionally occur (some moments of the BBC show "The Office" and its U.S.-produced version come to mind). Has a U.S. show ever taken these clashes as its main subject?

I’ll have to think about this (please post suggestions if you have them), as I think a show like “Arab Labor” may say something important about the function of comic expression in fostering social cohesion in this dramatically divided society. To share a laugh at this comedy’s situations is to confront the truth, on that level where comedy reaches us most effectively, that it’s our wrong-headed notions about one another that perpetuate all kinds of segregation, while our comic flaws show us to be very much alike.