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

This joke is met by groans that resonate through a storage facility in London.

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

The company's founder smiles, almost sheepishly at the joke. But the joke has made the cut and will feature in upcoming crackers.

"The success is gauged by the gag by the number of groans and the loudness of the groans at the table," the founder explains.

The key to a great holiday cracker pun is not the same as a stand-up gag per se. It is entirely about the context - in this instance, the communal amusement of the Christmas dinner table with elders, children and potentially friends.

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

The Science Of Shared Amusement

Coming together to experience communal amusement is not only nothing new, experts say, it is probably to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are chuckling with people around the Christmas table you are dropping into what's very likely a really ancient mammalian social sound," explains a neuroscience expert.

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

Researchers have found that a lack of these social exchanges can seriously damage both psychological and bodily health.

"Those you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to increased levels of 'happy chemical' uptake," she adds.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to enjoyable experiences, such as laughing with friends over a particularly terrible festive cracker gag.

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly pun with a Christmas cracker," she states. "You are in fact doing a lot of the truly vital work of building, preserving the social bonds you have with the people you love."

Which Occurs Inside the Mind?

But what is truly happening inside the brain when we hear a gag?

An awful lot occurs in reaction to humour, it turns out.

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

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

"During the study we observed a really fascinating pattern of activation," says the professor.

A joke stimulates not just the parts of the brain responsible for hearing and interpreting language, but also neural areas associated with both planning and starting motion and those linked to vision and memory.

Put all of this as a whole, and people listening to a pun have a complex series of brain reactions that support the laughter we hear.

The Contagious Power of Laughter

Scientists found that when a humorous phrase is combined with laughter there is a stronger response in the mind than the identical phrase when followed by a neutral sound.

"This was in parts of the brain that you would use to move your face into a smile or a laugh," the professor explains.

It means people are not just responding to funny words, they are reacting to the amusement that follows them.

Amusement, according to the expert, can be contagious.

So what does this imply for the chuckles heard at a Christmas table?

"People laugh more when you know people," she says, "and you laugh further when you like them or care for them."

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

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

The Search for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Will we ever discover the perfect joke?

Likely not, but that has not prevented experts from trying to.

In 2001, a professor established a research project for the planet's most humorous joke.

Over 40,000 gags later, with ratings lodged by 350,000 participants around the world, he has a better understanding than most as to what succeeds and what fails.

The perfect festive cracker pun needs to be brief, he explains.

"They must also need to be poor jokes, jokes that cause us to moan," he continues.

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

"This is because if no-one laughs – it's the gag's shortcoming, not yours.

"The fascinating part about the holiday cracker jokes is that none of us find them funny.

"It creates a shared experience around the gathering and I think it's wonderful."