20 Things You Didn't Know About O Brother, Where Art Thou?
16. The Prisoners Watch A Three Stooges Movie Because They Were Another Inspiration
The scene in which Pete and the prisoners watch a movie may be borrowed from Sullivan's Travels, but it is doing double duty as a hat-tip to O Brother, Where Art Thou?'s influences. That's because the movie that the prisoners are watching is also a significant one.
In Sullivan's Travels that film is Disney's Playful Pluto. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? the movie is Laughter In The Air (AKA Myrt And Marge), an obscure 1930s backstage musical based on a then-popular radio serial.
Laughter In The Air's main claim to fame today is as an early big screen appearance from Larry, Curly and Moe as performers with Ted Healy And His Stooges shortly before they split from Healy to strike out on their own.
The choice of a Three Stooges movie is a very deliberate one, because the slapstick escapades of O Brother's own trio of bumbling buffoons was always heavily indebted to that comedy tradition.
"It's a Three Stooges movie in a lot of ways," was, after all, precisely how Joel Coen would later describe his movie's setup of three guys pratfalling their way from one crisis to another.