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

This joke is greeted with moans that resonate through a storage facility in London.

This describes a joke-testing meeting with a company that makes supplies for gatherings. Its repertoire includes Christmas crackers.

The company's owner grins, nearly apologetically at the joke. But the joke has been selected and will appear in upcoming crackers.

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

The secret to a good holiday cracker pun is not the identical as a good joke per se. It is all about the setting - in this case, the shared laughter of the Christmas dinner table with elders, kids and possibly neighbours.

"The goal is for the gag to be something that brings the child together with the grandparent," she adds.

The Science Of Communal Laughter

Gathering to enjoy communal laughter is not only ancient, experts say, it is likely to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are laughing with others at the holiday dinner you are dropping into what's almost certainly a really primordial mammal play vocalisation," says a neuroscience expert.

Communal laughter, she says, aids in forge and strengthen social connections between people.

Scientists have found that a absence of these social exchanges can significantly harm both psychological and bodily well-being.

"Those you converse with, and share laughter with, it results in enhanced amounts of endorphin uptake," she continues.

These natural chemicals are the body's "happy chemicals" and are released both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in response to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with loved ones over a truly terrible Christmas cracker joke.

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

Which Occurs Inside the Mind?

But what is actually taking place inside the mind when we listen to a gag?

A tremendous amount occurs in response to comedy, it transpires.

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of brain scanner which shows which parts of the mind are working harder, researchers have been able to chart the regions that get more blood.

The research entails imaging the brains of healthy subjects and then exposing them to a collection of humorous words, accompanied by either a neutral sound, or recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we observed a really interesting pattern of activation," notes the neuroscientist.

A gag activates not just the parts of the brain responsible for hearing and understanding speech, but also brain areas involved in both preparation and starting movement and those linked to vision and recall.

Put these elements as a whole, and people hearing a joke have a complex set of brain reactions that underpin the amusement we experience.

The Contagious Power of Chuckles

Scientists discovered that when a funny word is paired with laughter there is a stronger reaction in the brain than the identical phrase when accompanied by a neutral sound.

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

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

Laughter, says the expert, can be infectious.

So what does this imply for the chuckles found at a holiday gathering?

"You laugh more when you are familiar with others," she notes, "and laughter increases more when you like them or love them."

When it comes to Christmas cracker puns, she says, the positive effect is more likely to be caused not by the gag itself, but from the reaction to it.

"The laughter is key. The joke is the terrible holiday cracker joke, and it's just a pretext to chuckle as a group."

The Quest for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Will we ever find the ultimate gag?

Probably not, but that has not stopped researchers from trying to.

In 2001, a professor set up a scientific project for the world's funniest joke.

Over 40,000 jokes later, with ratings lodged by hundreds of thousands of participants around the world, he has a better idea than many as to what succeeds and what fails.

The perfect Christmas cracker pun needs to be short, he says.

"They must also need to be poor jokes, jokes that make us moan," he adds.

The increasingly "awful" the joke, he says the better.

"The reason is that if nobody finds it funny – it's the joke's shortcoming, not yours.

"What's interesting about the holiday cracker jokes is that not one person find them funny.

"It creates a common moment around the gathering and I think it's lovely."