I've been wondering what kind of following the Stooges have in the U.K., because we do have a few British members here. I've also wondered if their humor would travel well, because their rough-house physical comedy and Brooklynese wisecracking seems so American.
Leaving topic behind me for a moment ... The Goons and Spike Milligan are pretty much an acquired taste over here too. I love 'em, but a lot of people just give you a quizzical look if you play any of the stuff. Same as US, I imagine; here the Goons, Tony Hancock, Round the Horne and all the old Brit OTR series have their diehard fans but don't make much of an impact on the mainstream any more, other than by the way they influence new generations of comics. And of course they all partly took their inspiration from the Marx bros, Stooges &c anyway.
The success of Python is very odd too, they became more like a pop group than a comic act, everyone chanted along with the lines at live shows. Still, in the US you can buy a complete DVD set of the Python television episodes, something we can't do over here, where it was made! Python took their inspiration from Milligan, who'd got it from the Marxs / Stooges ...
Odd that things like Are You Being Served and Benny Hill are so big Stateside - they are really reviled over here (unjustly, I think, in the case of Hill, whose real value has been rather overlooked at the expense of his later rather tired act).
It was a given that US comedy "didn't travel" until Taxi and Happy Days appeared - since then the floodgates have opened. UK is as Friends mad as anywhere else (though I can't see the appeal myself). Before Taxi there was only really the tremendous Bilko (though I don't think we ever had the series set in a factory), Bewitched, The Monkees, Dick Van Dyke and The Munsters (though I remember seeing The Odd Couple in the early 70s).
I always preferred the Hanna Barbera / Looney Tunes cartoons. They had that kind of knockabout slapstick that kids of my generation went for. The nearest to home-grown Stooges we had were The Goodies, three guys who got up to all kinds of surrealistic adventures, like fighting giant kittens and living earth-movers, or travelling up a Beanstalk to meet a "giant" who was in fact really short ... Their slapstick could be very Stooge like, they were obviously an inspiration. They were on TV right through the 70s, and were old university pals of the Pythons. There's an excellent DVD out there if anyone feels like checking it out.