For quick lookups, I usually use pydoc[1], which displays roughly the same help string but without having to go into the repl. I think there are several *doc functions like this. Off the top of my head I can think of texdoc (which usually just opens the pdf of the package documentation) and perldoc.
pydoc -b is also very useful as a standard lib reference when you're not connected to the internet and you can live with the quite interesting default color scheme.