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“The Coens may be the first major filmmakers since Preston Sturges to exploit the dramatic possibilities of stupidity. In Sturges’s movies, however, you don’t feel that the rubes and yokels are being put down. Sturges was an affectionate satirist of gabby democratic vitality, but the Coens can be sardonic, even misanthropic. In their world, stupidity leads to well-deserved disaster.” David Denby in The New Yorker.

In Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, the successful director of comedies wants to be taken seriously as an artist. He intends to make a grindingly earnest social realist film called O Brother, Where Art Thou? After a series of catastrophes, Sullivan realizes that making people laugh is more useful than lecturing them about their lot. Decades later the Coens made a movie called O Brother, Where Art Thou? which they claimed was based on The Odyssey. Then they said they hadn’t read The Odyssey.