This past weekend, my sister and I treated ourselves to an old favorite, a movie we’ve returned to over and over since childhood. Babes in Toyland, or March of the Wooden Soldiers as it is dually named, is a Laurel and Hardy flick from 1934, and not considered one of their best, though I love it dearly. I saw it for the first time at Shadowland Stages as a kid, back when they squeezed sporadic classic film screenings into their programming. It stuck with me, and since then we’d rent it out from the library or wait for it to come on TV over the holidays. It became a Shiffer staple.

As an adult, I can tell you that it is a deeply bizarre film, but utterly watchable, if not endlessly confounding. It takes place in fictional Toyland filled with fairytale characters in costumes so uncanny I can’t get them out of my mind. The three little pigs have heads of rubber that emote only enough to communicate fear of the evil, mortgage-wielding landlord, Mr. Barnaby. There’s a cat that’s clearly played by a grown man wearing ears, a mouse played by a monkey, and real alligators swimming in the moat along the entrance to Bogeyland. Yes, this is a real movie.

"What a commitment,” is what my sister said when we turned it off this time around. Filmmakers had limited special effects to help them in 1934, and the sheer amount of ingenuity that went into the creation of Toyland is what makes the movie great. Laurel and Hardy live in a gigantic shoe with real shoelaces tied at the top, and when the hero, Tom Tom, climbs to the highest window to sing, he plays one of the laces like a guitar. Someone really sat down and wrote that moment into the script, unfazed.

Movies like this are enthralling to me. They are proof of effort, down to the sausage links on the witness stand (another real detail). It’s amazing the lengths humans will go to in order to tell a silly story.

A few days later, I attended a murder mystery dinner with some friends and had the same thought. These “interactive experiences” are generally a little corny for me, but watching our hosts get in character and spin a tale of intrigue for us in real time as we dined was startlingly creative. It was storytelling, the art of it, the business of it, an ancient ritual.

But here’s another key: these stories are far from stellar. The plot is pretty thin in Babes in Toyland, Laurel and Hardy’s slapstick trademarks are an afterthought. The mystery around our dinner table was a simple whodunit. There is room in our culture of storytelling for the ridiculous and absurd, and there are artists wholly committed it. This is no great revelation, but sometimes I need a reminder of our capacity for fun as a species. And that’s when I know it’s time to put on Babes in Toyland.