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"What was the price did Father Christmas's sleigh cost? Zero, it was on the house."

This one-liner is greeted with groans that resonate through a storage facility in the capital.

This describes a humor-evaluation session with a firm that makes products for gatherings. Its repertoire includes Christmas crackers.

The firm's owner grins, almost apologetically at the gag. But the joke has made the cut and will appear in upcoming crackers.

"You measure the gag by the volume of groans and the loudness of the groans at the table," she explains.

The secret to a good Christmas cracker pun is not the identical as a stand-up gag per se. It is entirely about the context - in this instance, the shared laughter of the holiday meal with grandparents, kids and potentially neighbours.

"The goal is for the joke to be a thing that unites the eight-year-old together with the 80-year-old," she states.

The Science Of Shared Amusement

Coming together to enjoy shared laughter is not only ancient, experts argue, it is probably to be older than humanity.

"So when you are laughing with others around the Christmas dinner you are engaging in what's very likely a truly primordial mammalian social sound," says a professor.

Communal amusement, she says, helps make and maintain social connections between individuals.

Researchers have found that a lack of such interactions can seriously damage both psychological and bodily health.

"Those you talk to, and laugh with, it results in enhanced amounts of endorphin uptake," the professor adds.

These natural chemicals are the body's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to reduce stress and pain and in response to enjoyable experiences, such as chuckling with friends over a particularly awful festive cracker gag.

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly pun with a Christmas cracker," the expert says. "You are in fact doing a lot of the really vital work of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

What Occurs In the Brain?

But what is actually happening inside the mind when we listen to a joke?

An awful lot occurs in reaction to humour, it transpires.

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of neural imager which shows which parts of the mind are more active, researchers have been able to chart the regions that get more blood flow.

Testing entails scanning the brains of healthy participants and then subjecting them to a database of funny words, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or recorded laughter.

"During the study we observed a very interesting activation pattern of neural activity," says the professor.

A joke stimulates not just the parts of the brain in charge of hearing and interpreting speech, but also neural areas associated with both planning and starting motion and those involved in vision and recall.

Put all of this together, and individuals hearing a joke have a complex set of brain responses that support the laughter we experience.

The Contagious Nature of Laughter

Scientists discovered that when a humorous word is combined with chuckles there is a greater response in the mind than the identical phrase when followed by a neutral sound.

"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would employ to move your expression into a grin or a chuckle," she explains.

It indicates we are not just responding to humorous words, they are responding to the amusement that follows them.

Amusement, says the expert, can be infectious.

So what does this mean for the chuckles found at a Christmas gathering?

"People laugh more when you know people," she says, "and laughter increases more when you are fond of them or love them."

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she explains, the positive effect is more probable to be triggered not by the joke itself, but from the response to it.

"It's the laughter. The joke is the dreadful holiday cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to laugh as a group."

The Search for the Ideal Festive Pun

Will we ever find the perfect gag?

Probably not, but that has not prevented experts from attempting to.

Years ago, a psychologist set up a research search for the world's funniest joke.

Over tens of thousands of gags submitted, with scores lodged by 350,000 participants globally, he has a clearer idea than many as to what succeeds and what does not.

The ideal Christmas cracker joke needs to be short, he explains.

"They must also need to be bad jokes, puns that make us groan," he adds.

The increasingly "awful" the joke, he states the more effective.

"This is because if nobody laughs – it's the gag's fault, not yours.

"The fascinating part about the holiday cracker jokes is that not one person considers them funny.

"It creates a shared experience around the table and I think it's lovely."