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It's certainly fitting that "Monty Python's Flying Circus" hit the American consciousness at the same time as the computer age.

Random-access memory powers them both.

In the same way computers connect scattered bits of information, this celebrated sketchfest assembled arbitrary targets and comic styles right from its October 1969 debut on BBC telly.

Into a Victorian sitting room rush robed 15th century torturers, shouting, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!" The doorbell rings with a man from the BBC requesting they move to another sketch, at a home where a salesman pitches novelties like "plastic flesh wounds — keep your friends in stitches!" With the statement "We'd like to borrow your head for a piece of animation," the video switches to paper cutouts of decapitation.

Well, they weren't doing that on "The Carol Burnett Show." No Spanish Inquisition there. No dead parrot sketch, fish-slapping dance, cross-dressing lumberjacks or SPAM salutes, either.

No, it took an unruly troupe of high-spirited lads out of prestigious universities to turn TV sketch comedy into indiscriminate anarchy.

Forty years later, we're enjoying the fruits of their lunacy in everything from "South Park" to "Family Guy" to cult-coms such as IFC's "The Whitest Kids U Know" and Adult Swim's "The Mighty Boosh." Giddy scattershot irreverence has established itself as a sort of comic inquisition, now expected to pop up unexpectedly.

It's a paradox. That's the point.

Surreal absurdity even fuels the six-part docuseries "Monty Python: Almost the Truth — The Lawyer's Cut" (Sunday-Friday at 9 p.m. on IFC), a 40th-anniversary Python tribute, explanation and insurrection in its own right. Watch a bomb drop on the barrister in the opening credits. Savor the James Bond-ian theme song, lyrics changing nightly as the singer gets progressively fed up. The individual hours have titles such as "The Not So Interesting Beginnings" and "The Much Funnier Second Episode."

"Monty Python" blasted into prominence by exploding its origin era's "deferential culture," as explained in a "Truth" interview with troupe member John Cleese. Those uptight post-World War II years, the same ones currently seen through an American lens in "Mad Men," certainly shaped the Pythons — Cleese and his five fellow writer-actor-animators. But that constricted social temper also had them champing at the bit. After bourgeois educations in law and medicine at Oxford and Cambridge (or physics at Occidental College), they understood cultural conventions so precisely as to subvert them all the more effectively.

But cultural commentary wasn't necessarily the goal. The Pythons liked to amuse themselves silly. Their breadth of knowledge and experience simply meant their giggle targets ranged all over the map, the media and the epochs of history.

A job applicant enters the Ministry of Silly Walks. The game show "Blackmail" confronts unsuspecting citizens with their misdeeds. Eager readers compete in the All-England Summarize Proust Competition. A penguin atop a TV explodes before two mystified middle-aged housewives.

Who were played by male Python writer-troupers Cleese, Graham Chapman (the dignified everyman), Terry Jones (the stubborn terrier), Eric Idle (the focused businessman) or Michael Palin (the amiable one), who portrayed nearly every person and thing they wrote. If a sketch didn't suggest a suitable ending, they might jump-cut to bizarre animations from Terry Gilliam (their cracked American colleague). That helped "plaster over a lot of cracks," Palin confesses in "Almost the Truth."

No matter what the Pythons tackled, their absurdity resonated with a growing fandom of unorthodox amusement seekers.

"It became a sort of currency in which you connected with other people," notes Sanjeev Bhaskar, the British-born Indian comic — just one of the famous devotees whose comments are intercut on IFC with fresh recollections from the five surviving Pythons. (Chapman died of cancer in 1989.) "They didn't shut anyone out," Bhaskar marvels. "It's very inclusive."

Testifying in "Almost the Truth" are "Saturday Night Live" creator Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Izzard, Russell Brand, Seth Green and IFC's own Whitest Boys. Their view from the outside complements the Pythons' internal memory — their youths and inspirations, their BBC success and censorship battles, their mid-'70s American crossover and global fame, their ambitious film satires "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "Life of Brian," their live shows and reunions.

Although "Almost the Truth" could be called an inside job — co-director Bill Jones is the son of Python Terry Jones — the Pythons don't mince words or feelings. They exhume their dissensions, their breakup/reunion/breakups, and Chapman's problematic alcoholism, about which Chapman also speaks frankly in archive interviews.

It's the kind of clarity that permeates their comedy — intelligent, unflinching, open-hearted. Although "Monty Python" premiered at a time of counterculture vs. establishment conflict — Vietnam, civil rights, etc. — the Pythons somehow rose above the malice while still reflecting seismic cultural shifts.

They also immutably fused the funny to music ("The Lumberjack Song," "Every Sperm Is Sacred") for new generations living to their own cultural soundtrack. And Monty Python firmly integrated animation, a form then throwing off its cartoon straitjacket to bloom into vibrant artistry.

Python comedy delivered a whole ball of wax in a way that continues to reverberate in next-generation permutations. Yet, as Idle says in "Almost the Truth," the original remains definitively unique.

"I'm very proud that it's still offensive," he declares.

But as good as they may be feeling about it these days, the past will stay past. They are doing other things — acting, directing, writing books and newspaper pieces, this, that. Cleese is a busy character actor and sometime lecturer at Cornell. Jones co-wrote an opera, of all things, "Evil Machines." Idle — who spun "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" into "Spamalot!" and recently staged "An Evening Without Monty Python" (Python sketches played by others) — says in the film, "People say, 'Let's get the Beatles back together. ...' Well, you just want to be young again."

But that's only part of it. People just like happy endings.

"Is it a good thing to go over all this stuff?" Palin wondered aloud. "I don't know. Are we learning anything else? Probably. But will it change the way we look at Python? Absolutely not."

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