VIDEO : MONTY PYTHON BROKE ALL THE RULES.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

Thirty years ago, the Beatles - who helped turn Western culture inside out - were breaking up, but another band of British naughty boys was just getting a forum to thumb their collective noses at, well, just about everyone.

On Oct. 5, 1969, ``Monty Python's Flying Circus'' debuted on the British Broadcasting Corp., and the world of comedy hasn't been the same. Irreverent, innovative and intelligent, Monty Python's humor was as surreal as it was broad. Sketches were often an unlikely combination of ``Alice in Wonderland'' meets British music-hall bawdiness, with the line ``and now for something completely different'' meaning the lads repeating the same sketch over again.

The series ran until 1973, and while it's been available on video, A&E is beginning to release it on DVD, with some bonuses. (Columbia recently put out ``Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' on DVD for $24.99). The series comes in a two-disc packet ($24.99) with three episodes on each disc, which have added material like clips from their 1982 Hollywood Bowl appearance and bios of the boys. There are four sets from the first season.

Comprised of John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, and the late Graham Chapman, the boys didn't even have a name when they were conceiving the show, but their zaniness resulted in a BBC executive referring to them as a ``flying circus.'' No one seems to remember who came up with Monty Python, but Palin had suggested Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus from a name he found in the paper. Luckily it didn't fly.

Once on the air, Monty Python quickly established itself, as one writer put it, ``a state of mind.'' The absurd was normal, normal was absurd. In a famous early sketch called ``The Funniest Joke in the World,'' a comedy writer conceives the world's funniest joke and dies laughing. The scene quickly segues to a breathless reporter covering the action as a policeman tries to remove the deadly joke from the writer's house as if it were a bomb.

The scene quickly shifts again as the joke somehow becomes part of the Allied effort to defeat the Germans. Hitler is shown telling a joke (not really, of course) as the Germans try to develop their own deadly joke. Soon, Allied troops are running through woods, shouting out the joke in German (so they are unaffected), as Nazi troops fall like flies. All this in about four minutes.

If the Pythons were afraid to poke fun at sacred cows, they weren't afraid to put their Oxford educations (not all of them) to use, either. Who else would have Cardinal Richelieu, chief adviser to France's Louis XIII, as a character in a skit. Well, actually it isn't the cardinal but a Richelieu impersonator, but you get the idea of silliness. Then again they had Mozart hosting a program on famous death scenes and Picasso painting during a bicycle race.

In ``The Holy Grail,'' the lads skewer - or is it lance? - the Arthurian legend as the knights pretend to ride through the kingdom while their servants follow behind smacking two coconuts together to simulate hoofbeats.

If their lunacy wasn't always brilliant, it was always inspired, and their influence on comedy is incalculable. What the Pythons did was help rewrite the rules - jokes didn't need punch lines, sketches didn't need endings, and if the confines of traditional humor boxed them in, they just destroyed the box.

There is blurb on the series cover that probably wasn't written by one of the Pythons: ``Now in glorious digital DVD format so that you, the digital aficionado, can enjoy the original scratches, pops and hisses with crystal clarity.'' It's a bit of irony that the boys would appreciate. Nevertheless, in another irony, they do look great on DVD.

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Photo: John Cleese, left, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones, Graham Chapman, Michael Palin and Eric Idle debuted as Monty Python 30 years ago.