In 1969 “Easy Rider” was in theaters, the Chicago Eight were on trial, and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” debuted on British television. A stream-of-consciousness Molotov cocktail of sex, violence, and verbal pyrotechnics, spiked with Terry Gilliam’s absurdist animations, it ignored punchlines and threw the creaky conventions of comedy out the window.

Within the first five minutes of the first episode, a shipwrecked survivor struggles onto a beach and mutters the word “It’s,” before dropping dead, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart introduces a celebrity death show, and a group of British housewives admit that they can’t tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab. “It’s true,” one of them moans. “We can’t tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and a dead crab.”

Compare a 1970 episode of “Flying Circus” to this week’s “Saturday Night Live,” and “Circus” comes out looking faster, smarter, and more contemporary than the plodding “SNL.” And pitting any of the movies made by Monty Python or its members against the current crop of comedies like “Beerfest” is just cruel. Python’s movies aren’t just gag-fests, they’re also some of the most tightly structured and best-written movies of the last 50 years. Beginning tonight, Film Forum puts its money where my mouth is with the Python retrospective “Python-a-Lot.”

Even after ignoring “Jabberwocky” (an early Terry Gilliam experiment) and “And Now for Something Completely Different” (an early cash-in attempt) you’ve still got six films that are classics by anyone’s standards.

“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (9/22–28) was the first Python movie, the one everyone can recite from, and it’s also the worst. It starts strong but gets sidetracked, meanders around for a while, and ends in disappointment. The much-reviled “Meaning of Life” (9/29) is the surprise. Long regarded as an inferior film, the Pythons claim it contains their best material, and they’re right. Its posh production values and lush cinematography strike sparks with some of the rudest and funniest sketches in the Python playbook: live organ donations, an all-Catholic musical number entitled “Every Sperm is Sacred,” and an elegant restaurant turned into a vomitorium by the world’s fattest man (“Would you like an after-dinner mint, sir?”). But it’s easy to see where its poor reputation originated: It’s the movie that came after “The Life of Brian” (9/30).

Originally titled “Jesus Christ: Lust for Glory,” “The Life of Brian” tells the story of Brian, who’s born in the manger across the street from Jesus, is mistaken for the Messiah, and gets roped into a terrorist plot to overthrow the Romans. “Brian” was protested heartily upon its release, most likely because it advances the bizarre notion that perhaps killing people isn’t the most practical application of a religious philosophy that says “Blessed are the peacemakers.”

Razor sharp and savagely intelligent, if one comedy is likely to survive the 20th century, it’ll be “The Life of Brian,” because the more suicide bombers blow themselves up, the more fundamentalists try to turn America back into a Christian nation, the funnier and funnier this movie gets.

Through October 5 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).