By CHARLES McGRATH


Astonishingly, “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” the groundbreaking BBC comedy series, is 40 years old this year. As Terry Jones, one of the six-member troupe who created and acted in the show, said recently: “Time just seems to get quicker. You look in the mirror in the morning and you think, ‘I’m already shaving again!’”

The principals are all in late middle age now, and have in some ways become the very sorts of people they used to poke fun at. Michael Palin makes travel documentaries. Mr. Jones makes documentaries and writes scholarly books about the Middle Ages, the period the Pythons so memorably sent up in their film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Terry Gilliam, animator turned filmmaker, is still quixotically obsessed with making a movie about Don Quixote. Eric Idle, who’s mostly responsible for the long-running Broadway production of “Spamalot,” writes musical shows, many of them recycling Python material. And John Cleese, who at 70 is the oldest of the group, in addition to appearing in movies and television comedies and making golf-ball commercials, sometimes turns into a cranky old man complaining about Britain’s tabloids.

He doesn’t watch much comedy anymore. “As you get older you laugh less,” he says, “because you’ve heard most of the jokes before.”

The show, on the other hand, hasn’t aged a bit. In the United States, “Flying Circus” didn’t catch on until 1974, when it was pretty much off the air in Britain.

But the show has had a surprisingly durable afterlife there, giving rise to second and third generations of fans who watch it on DVD and on YouTube, where it’s so popular it now has its own dedicated channel. Mr. Cleese said recently that in England he is far better known these days as Basil Fawlty, the title character in his post-Python series “Fawlty Towers. But even in American middle schools now, there’s often a smart aleck or two who can do Mr. Cleese’s Silly Walk and know the Dead Parrot sketch by heart.

On October 15 all five surviving Pythons are appearing in a rare reunion at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York. (Graham Chapman, the sixth member of the troupe, died of throat cancer in 1989.) And starting on October 18 the Independent Film Channel is devoting a whole week to Pythoniana and will broadcast one episode a day of “Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer’s Cut),” a new six-hour documentary, along with some of the “Python” films and episodes from the first season of “Flying Circus.”

There will almost certainly be squabbling at the reunion. “They love getting angry and shouting at each other,” Ben Timlett, a director and producer of the documentary, said recently. There were (and are) genuine differences among the Pythons, and there have been so many books, articles and documentaries that there is no truly reliable account of practically anything associated with the group. Partly for this reason, a number of the Pythons were initially reluctant to take part in the documentary.

“We did it because Jones needed money,” Mr. Cleese said, laughing, referring to the fact that Mr. Jones is separated from his wife and is now expecting a baby with his much younger girlfriend. “Anyone entering on fatherhood at age 67 needs all the help he can get.”

The movies - “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” an Arthurian parody; “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” a spoof of the Gospels, which in New York was picketed by both rabbis and nuns; and “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” a collection of sketches that deal with everything from contraception to death by overeating - gave the group a brief but very profitable second life until, with “The Meaning of Life,” the members reached a kind of creative impasse, spinning off in too many different directions.

“The one thing we all agreed on, our chief aim, was to be totally unpredictable and never to repeat ourselves,” Mr. Jones said. “We wanted to be unquantifiable. That ‘pythonesque’ is now an adjective in the O.E.D. means we failed utterly.”

Hardly. The documentary includes several interviews with younger comics like Steve Coogan, Jimmy Fallon and Russell Brand, talking about how much the Pythons meant to them. And yet the Python example is so hard to imitate that the group’s influence on contemporary comedy is less than one might imagine.

“A lot of contemporary comedy seems self-conscious,” Mr. Palin said. “It’s almost documentary, like ‘The Office.’ That’s a very funny show, but you’re looking at the human condition under stress. The Pythons made the human condition seem like fun.”

He added: “I’m proud to be a Python. It’s a badge of silliness, which is quite important. I was the gay lumberjack, I was the Spanish Inquisition, I was one-half of the fishslapping dance. I look at myself and think that may be the most important thing I’ve ever done.”


TERRY GILLIAM; BELOW, JASON MERRITT/GETTY IMAGES / A scene from a Monty Python animation. Below, John Cleese in a sketch on silly walks.