Like “The way of the future,” one of those repeated lines that just gets better and better the more you hear it. You get it three times in that scene where we find out that Pete’s cousin has brought the law to his barn in order to collect the three escapees from the chain gang. Everett wakes up before the other two, the sound of someone with the megaphone speaking. There should not be anyone with a megaphone at this time of night outside the barn; damn, we’re in a tight spot. He looks out and sees torches, the paddy wagon, dogs, a posse; damn, we’re in a tight spot. In both of these instances, I think he’s making a pretty good point. Those are tight spots. Not an impossible one to get out of, necessarily, but they’re very clearly in trouble. It’s the third one, exclaimed after the cops start firing guns at the barn, that misses the point a little bit. “Damn, we’re in a tight spot!” Everett says, eyes bugging out of his head, on all fours because several rounds from a tommy gun have just landed right above his head. Once bullets and barn-burning are involved, “tight spot” goes from accurate assessment to understatement real quick.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is on my shortlist for the laugh-out-loudest Coen Brothers movie. It’s among the very goofiest movies they’ve ever done, and because the film isn’t so sly, like Raising Arizona, or cynical, like Burn After Reading, the laughter is more childlike, more pure. Even though Everett, Pete, and Delmar are only together because of the chain gang, none of them are dangerous types. Everett is only dangerous if you think Wile E. Coyote is dangerous. Pete is too much of a knucklehead to get worked up about. (John Turturro’s switch flipping in this scene from “He’s kin!” to “I’m gonna kill you!” is the thing that makes me laugh hardest in this scene.) And then there’s Delmar, just the sweetest little fella you ever did meet, a man who goes on to be so certain that Pete was transfigured into a toad that he’ll tell Pete, very slowly: “We. Thought. You. Were. A. Toad.” The stakes are about as low as they get for three guys off the chain gang. We’re free to giggle relentlessly.

The Coens understand something important about swear words, and what they get is that “damn” is a much funnier word than “fucking.” “Damn” is a low-stakes word, and it matches these penny-ante people who we’re following around in the film. Everett, a learned dope if ever there was one, peppers his speech with variants on “damn” because they’re so much funnier than the other words he could be using. “Consider the lilies of the goddam field,” he tells Pete while his tall compadre gets weary. I’ve already referenced “I don’t want Fop, God damn it, I’m a Dapper Dan man!” in this series, and I’ll do it again because it’s perfect. Somehow even better is Everett’s continued insistence that he is the “damn paterfamilias” no matter how dead his wife has told the kids he is. Yet it’s not George Clooney who gets the most terrifically loony use of “damn” in this movie. It’s about him, not from him. When the boys come out in their beards to perform “Man of Constant Sorrow,” the cry goes up. “HOT DAMN” someone shouts. “IT’S THE SOGGY BOTTOM BOYS.”