Do teenage Muslim boys ogle hot girls, or is that against the boys’ religion? How important is a prayer rug in a Muslim person’sdaily life? Are some small-town Midwesterners racist when it comes to interacting with Muslims, or are they just afraid?

Those issues and many more were the topics of lively debate at Chicago’s Northside College Preparatory High School on the morning of Sept. 11, but this wasn’t part of a discussion of the events of six years ago.

The studio behind the topical CW television comedy “Aliens in America,” which premieres Oct. 1 on WGN-Ch. 9, brought the first episode of the show to the school as part of a promotional tour that has visited the Islamic Center of Southern California and will arrive at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank, in a couple of weeks.

The show is not your typically brainless network sitcom. It’s a topical, sharp comedy about a Pakistani Muslim exchange student who arrives in Medora, Wis., to live with the Tolchucks, a family that is less than thrilled with his arrival — at first. “Aliens” mines the pained and sometimes ignorant reactions of the Tolchucks and of the Medora locals to the teen.

Yet “Aliens” is also the poignant story of two outcasts — a Pakistani named Raja Musharraf and the nerdy American student Justin Tolchuck — who bond over what they have in common: They both feel like aliens within the universe of their high school.

Because the subject matter is so tricky, and because the show is on the lower-visibility CW network, the studio behind the show, CBS Paramount Network Television, has scheduled various promotional screenings, including the one at the Islamic Center of Southern California. The reaction there was “overwhelmingly positive,” said Amy Pietz, who plays Franny Tolchuck, the mother on the show, and who led the postscreening discussions at Northside.

As executive producer David Guarascio told Variety: “They were excited to have a show that was a comedy and where the Muslim character wasn’t a terrorist.”

“Word-of-mouth is a key element of our marketing campaign,” said Lauri Metrose, vice president of communications for CBS Paramount Network Television. “We have a lot of faith that audiences will embrace ‘Aliens in America’ because it’s smart, funny, timely and relatable. Hosting screenings and discussions at various high schools, colleges and universities … are all unconventional ways we hope to garner attention for the show.”

The well-made, provocative comedy mixes the wistfulness of “The Wonder Years” with the prickly outsider humor of the CW’s “Everybody Hates Chris,” and as one perceptive Northside student noted, it also has elements of “Freaks and Geeks,” the cult show created by mega-successful filmmaker Judd Apatow eight years ago.

Certainly Justin Tolchuck (Dan Byrd) would fit right in with the “Freaks” cast, and he’s also among the most winning of the many nerdy characters on new fall shows.

“I think any teenager’s lowest point comes when his mother imports a friend for him,” he deadpans in one of his dry voice-overs.

The shy, courteous Raja is not the typically crass sitcom teen either, and he’s not exactly welcomed with open arms at Justin’s high school. On Raja’s first day, another student thinks it’s hilarious to compare him to the convenience-store owner on “The Simpsons.”

“Apu, where’s my slushie?” Raja hears as he walks the halls of the high school.

The Tolchuck parents can barely disguise their discomfort at Raja’s presence (they had “ordered” an exchange student from London, the mystified father explains to Raja).

And though her son Justin quickly bonds with Raja as a fellow outcast, Franny Tolchuck (Pietz’s character) wonders whether he might be just posing as a student — what if he’s really a terrorist? When her husband says their town is the unlikely target, she hisses, “Oh, so now Medora’s not important enough to blow up? Where’s your civic pride?”

Later, Franny flips out when she finds Justin alongside Raja as the latter does one of his five daily prayers. Soon she’s on the phone with a travel agent, booking Raja a plane ticket “from Chippewa Falls to Islamabad.”

The program was played three times for various groups of Northside students, and afterward there were discussions led by Pietz. The Sept. 11 date of the screenings was actually a coincidence, but as it happens, Muslim-American relations is one of the central themes of “Aliens.”

There are no harsher critics than high schoolers, but the reception from the students at Northside College Prep, a selective-enrollment school with 1,112 students and an ethnically diverse student body, was largely positive. They generally seemed to think that the depiction of high school was reasonably accurate, if exaggerated a little for comic effect, and the Muslim students in the audiences approved of the portrayal of Raja.

Students of all ethnicities thought the show was funny, and they laughed throughout the screenings. But, as one student noted, “it takes a lot of guts” to make a comedy that mines such tricky territory.

Some of the students did think that one scene in particular, in which a teacher leads a myopic, insensitive “discussion” of Raja’s heritage, was too harsh.