when did British men cease being funny? There hasn't been a truly great British male comedy presence since Monty Python (nope, "Kids in the Hall" and all those Second City players are Canadian), a fact that came wistfully into focus during the January 11 edition of "Saturday Night Live," when guests Michael Palin and John Cleese dusted off the Dead Parrot Sketch again. Monty Python were the Beatles of comedy — cheeky and hip and naughty and fab — and they inspired something close to rock-band fandom on American college campuses in the mid-'70s. Now, the aging Pythons and Sir Paul McCartney are but fond reminders of Brittania's pop cultural rule.

On their "SNL" appearance (to plug their "Fish Called Wanda" sequel "Fierce Creatures"), Palin and Cleese made like veteran rockers on a reunion tour, running through the golden oldie about the parrot who is no more, who has ceased to be, who has rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible, with a disconcerting lack of zip. The moment was an acute pain/pleasure sort of thing, like watching the Stones crank up "Satisfaction" again, or the Who grind out "My Generation." These pop icons of our youth have become waxy museum pieces, national treasures, stuffed and mounted souvenirs of wilder times. While I for one am glad Palin and Cleese are still among us doing new work, it was fairly depressing to watch them beating a dead, er, parrot.

American viewers, numbed from round-the-clock PBS showings of creaky burlesques like "Are You Being Served?" and "Keeping Up Appearances," may well be wondering if there is anyone out there carrying on the grand "Goon Show"/Beyond the Fringe/Python tradition of nasty, spiky British satire and sketch comedy. And, from this side of the Atlantic, it certainly looks as though, in comedy as in royalty, it is the women who are the ones dragging England kicking and screaming into the modern world. Fortunately, the comedians — "Absolutely Fabulous" creator/star Jennifer Saunders, her former partner Dawn French (does anybody remember their amazing feminist sketch comedy series "French and Saunders"?), Tracey Ullman — have had a much easier time of it than Fergie and Di.

The wicked premise of "Absolutely Fabulous," which returns to Comedy Central Sunday (Jan. 19) with the TV movie special "The Last Shout," is the inability of self-styled jet-setters Edina Monsoon (Saunders) and Patsy Stone (Joanna Lumley) to accept the fact that they're not 20 anymore. Eddie and Patsy party like it's 1969, hitting the booze and the drugs with comical abandon, making valiant, if usually unsuccessful, stabs at sex with younger men. In order to keep up the illusion of youth, Eddie squeezes into trendy Lacroix and Prada couture two sizes too small, while former Bond girl (or so she claims) and current fashion industry freeloader Patsy has had so much face work, she can't laugh, she can only whinny. The duo's "been there, done that, sweetie darling" superiority toward anybody younger (or any younger body) can't hide their raging envy, their self delusion, their stunted growth. Eddie and Patsy are horrible, just horrible, and hilarious.

One of the reasons "AbFab" became such a sensation in the U.S. when it debuted on Comedy Central three years ago was that American viewers had never seen such unseemly female behavior on a sitcom before (on "Dynasty," maybe). Actually, Eddie and Patsy's behavior wasn't reminiscent of soap queens so much as it was an absolutely fabulous dagger-through the-heart lampooning of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The perpetually agitated Eddie flaps around like a distressed turkey, mincing and huffing and pouting with her hands on her hips and her eyes rolling. Gaunt, Stoli-swilling Patsy, while elegantly turned in her Ivana Trump French twist and Chanel suits, is a tough old girl, and she shadows Eddie like a walking corpse, a cigarette epoxied to her lower lip. She's a woman of few words and languid movements, indicating her feelings by snorts of approval, snorts of disapproval or snorts of coke.

In Eddie and Patsy, Saunders (who wrote all 18 episodes of "AbFab") is sending up the forever young/eventually foolish poses of '60s and '70s rock stars, as well as the denial of a generation that can't bear to have been succeeded in hipness. Most of all, "AbFab" upends the double standard of aging — on men, acting 20 when you're 40 (or 50) is praised as heroic or indicative of essential timelessness or vigor; on women, it's treated as comedy.

So Saunders turns the double standard on itself, taking Eddie and Patsy's Lucille Ball-sy physical clowning to ridiculous extremes, and infusing their outrageously bad behavior with an in-your-face bitterness that has the sting of emotional truth. "You're gonna turn into me one day, you know!" Eddie childishly taunts her bookish, disapproving college-age daughter Saffron (Julia Sawalha). "And you'll turn into me, dear," chirps Eddie's own mum (June Whitfield), whose addled sweetness gives you no clue as to what she did to earn Eddie's unyielding hostility. "AbFab" stares down some primal female fears — aging, being replaced, being unloved and unlovable. It's ugly comedy, and you can't turn away, or keep from laughing. To put it in rock 'n' roll terms, "AbFab" is Polly Jean Harvey with a laugh track (though, characteristically clueless, Eddie and Patsy are still listening to Lulu, Sandie Shaw and Suzi Quatro).

"AbFab: The Last Shout" (which goes into home video release January 21), is titled in reference to both "The Last Waltz," the Band's farewell concert movie, and "The Last Supper." In "The Last Shout," Eddie faces mortality, briefly thinks she's Jesus, then is jolted back to reality by something even scarier than death — Saffron is engaged, and Eddie can't deal with it because she can barely deal with having a daughter at all.

Saunders has written one of her best "AbFab" scripts here. There are unforgettable slapstick scenes of Eddie and Patsy on a skiing vacation at Val D'Isere and some of the choicest insults in "AbFab" history (Patsy's putdown of Saffron, her rival for Eddie's attention: "She is a virgin in a world where men will even turn to soft fruit for pleasure"). But there's a sharp, melancholy aftertaste as well. Threatened by her daughter's growing up, Eddie is having visions of her youth in Swinging London. And as shallow and spiteful as she is, Saunders makes you feel her shame at what a rotten mother she's been, and how terrified she is at giving up her place at the banquet to someone younger.

"The Last Shout" takes "AbFab's" main themes — female friendship and competitiveness, mother-daughter tensions, the tyranny of fashion — to their logical, if twisted, conclusions. A past-life regression reveals that Eddie and Patsy were once conjoined, bickering circus freakshow twins. Poor neglected Saffron finds a fiancé just like mom — someone she can never, ever please. And in a near-death experience on the ski slopes, Eddie sees God, who turns out to be Marianne Faithfull, of course, and she looks a hell of a lot better than Mick does these days.

Saunders is said to be undecided about whether "The Last Shout" will be the last "AbFab" project (the series is no longer running in England and plans for a Roseanne-produced American version fell through). But since "AbFab" is about two women who never had any dignity to lose and who will go to any length to deny the aging process, the show has a built-in hedge against irrelevence. At the very least, we need Eddie and Patsy as an antidote to the next Stones tour.

As for Tracey Ullman, "the expatriate mimic" (as a faux Queen Elizabeth calls her in an upcoming episode of her HBO series "Tracey Takes On ...") is a comedy troupe of one. On her previous Fox sketch comedy series and now on HBO (the second season of "Tracey Takes On ..." begins Saturday, Jan. 18), she has become the most dizzyingly chameleonic funnyperson since Peter Sellers.

In "Takes On ...," Ullman wears elaborate makeup to portray a variety of characters; each episode consists of three filmed segments built around a central theme, like "Sex" (the season opener) or "Fantasy." Ullman's list of multiple personalities has grown to include men (Chic, the hairy, horny New York cab driver of indeterminate ethnicity; Trevor, the gay flight attendant) and women of diverse ages, social classes, sexual orientations and races. Ullman doesn't truly disappear into these personae — although they are each distinct, there is still something of herself that comes through, an energy, an optimism, that dignifies a character like 12-stepped has-been TV star Linda Granger, for instance. But it also takes the bite out of a character like Chic, who should be unlikably goatish, but comes off as kind of petting zoo-y.

You can see Ullman's opposing impulses at play here. Living in Los Angeles, working with pros who used to write for "Carol Burnett" and other variety shows and sitcoms, Ullman indulges her born-again Borscht Belt sensibilities with sparkling one-liners of old-school perfection (Long Island matron Fern Rosenthal complaining about her amorous husband: "As soon as I shut off Nick at Nite, up pops Harry's late-night classic"). But Ullman is still hip enough to gravitate toward provocative subjects like class, homosexuality and religion.

At Ullman's best, the two impulses converge in high-gloss jokes and piercing satire. Her lawyer character Sydney Kross (who appears in the January 25 "Tracey Takes On... Fantasy" episode) is a brutal spoof of superstar attorneys Marcia Clark and Leslie Abramson. With her blinding self-satisfaction, her roof-rattling tantrums and her laser-focused ambition, Sydney is as loudly outsized, in her own way, as Eddie and Patsy. Like Saunders, Ullman offers humor as power. Sometimes the most liberating thing a woman can do is step back, take a hard look at herself and laugh.

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