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"How much did Santa's sleigh cost? Zero, it was on the house."

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

We're at a humor-evaluation meeting with a firm that produces supplies for gatherings. Its catalogue features festive crackers.

The company's founder grins, nearly sheepishly at the gag. But the joke has made the cut and will feature in future crackers.

"The success is gauged by the joke by the volume of groans and the loudness of the groans around the table," the founder explains.

The key to a good Christmas cracker joke is not the same as a stand-up joke per se. It is entirely about the context - in this instance, the shared laughter of the Christmas dinner table with elders, children and possibly neighbours.

"You want the gag to be a thing that unites the child together with the 80-year-old," she states.

The Science Of Shared Laughter

Coming together to experience shared amusement is not only ancient, scientists argue, it is probably to be older than humanity.

"So when you are laughing with people around the Christmas dinner you are engaging in what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammalian social vocalisation," says a neuroscience expert.

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

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

"The people you converse with, and share laughter with, it results in enhanced levels of 'happy chemical' release," she continues.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are produced both to alleviate stress and pain and in reaction to pleasurable activities, such as laughing with loved ones over a truly awful Christmas cracker gag.

"You're not just laughing at a silly joke with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are in fact performing a lot of the truly important work of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

What Occurs In the Brain?

But what is truly happening within the brain when we listen to a gag?

A tremendous amount happens in response to humour, it turns out.

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of neural imager which shows which parts of the mind are working harder, scientists have been able to map the areas that get more blood.

The research entails scanning the brains of volunteer participants and then subjecting them to a collection of humorous phrases, accompanied by either a neutral sound, or recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we got a really interesting pattern of activation," notes the professor.

A joke stimulates not just the parts of the mind responsible for auditory processing and interpreting speech, but also brain regions associated with both preparation and starting movement and those involved in vision and memory.

Combine these elements together, and individuals listening to a pun have a complex series of neural reactions that underpin the amusement we hear.

The Contagious Power of Chuckles

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

"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would employ to contort your expression into a smile or a laugh," she explains.

It means people are not just responding to humorous words, they are responding to the laughter that accompanies them.

Amusement, says the professor, can be infectious.

So what does this mean for the chuckles found around a holiday gathering?

"People 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 feel-good factor is more likely to be triggered not by the gag itself, but from the response to it.

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

The Quest for the Perfect Festive Pun

Is it possible to discover the ultimate gag?

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

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

Over 40,000 gags submitted, with scores provided by 350,000 people globally, he has a better understanding than most as to what succeeds and what does not.

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

"But they also need to be bad jokes, jokes that make us moan," he continues.

The more "awful" the joke, he states 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 find them funny.

"It creates a shared moment around the gathering and I believe it's lovely."