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"How much did Santa's sleigh cost? Nothing, it was on the house."

This quip is greeted with groans that resonate through a storage facility in the capital.

This describes a humor-evaluation session with a firm that makes supplies for gatherings. Its catalogue features festive crackers.

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

"You measure the gag by the volume of moans and the intensity of the groans around the table," the founder says.

The secret to a good Christmas cracker pun is not the identical as a good gag in itself. It is all about the context - in this instance, the shared laughter of the Christmas meal with elders, kids and potentially friends.

"You want the gag to be something that brings the eight-year-old in harmony with the grandparent," she states.

The Science Of Communal Amusement

Coming together to enjoy communal laughter is not only nothing new, scientists argue, it is probably to be older than humanity.

"Therefore when you are laughing with people around the holiday table you are engaging in what's very likely a truly ancient mammalian play vocalisation," explains a professor.

Communal amusement, she says, helps forge and strengthen social connections between individuals.

Scientists have discovered that a absence of these social exchanges can significantly harm both psychological and bodily health.

"The people you talk to, and laugh with, it results in increased levels of endorphin release," she adds.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in reaction to enjoyable experiences, such as laughing with friends over a particularly terrible Christmas cracker joke.

"It's not simply chuckling at a foolish pun with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are in fact doing a lot of the really vital task of building, preserving the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

Which Occurs In the Brain?

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

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

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of brain scanner which shows which parts of the brain are more active, scientists have been able to chart the areas that get more blood flow.

The research entails imaging the minds of volunteer participants and then subjecting them to a database of funny phrases, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we got a very fascinating pattern of activation," notes the professor.

A gag stimulates not just the parts of the mind responsible for auditory processing and understanding language, but also brain regions involved in both planning and starting movement and those involved in vision and memory.

Combine these elements together, and people hearing a joke have a sophisticated series of brain responses that support the amusement we experience.

The Infectious Power of Chuckles

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

"This was in areas of the mind that you would employ to contort your face into a smile or a chuckle," she says.

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

Laughter, according to the professor, can be infectious.

So what does this mean for the laughter found around a Christmas gathering?

"You laugh more when you are familiar with others," she says, "and you laugh further when you like them or love them."

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

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

The Search for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Is it possible to find the perfect gag?

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

In 2001, a psychologist established a scientific search for the planet's funniest gag.

Over tens of thousands of jokes later, with scores lodged by hundreds of thousands of participants globally, he has a clearer understanding than many as to what succeeds and what does not.

The ideal festive cracker joke must be brief, he explains.

"They must also need to be bad gags, jokes that cause us to groan," he continues.

The more "terrible" the joke, he says the more effective.

"The reason is that if no-one finds it funny – it's the joke's fault, not yours.

"What's interesting about the holiday cracker jokes is that none of us considers them funny.

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