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

This one-liner is met by moans that resonate through a storage facility in London.

This describes a joke-testing meeting with a firm that makes products for social events. Its catalogue includes Christmas crackers.

The company's founder grins, almost sheepishly at the gag. But the pun has been selected and will feature in upcoming crackers.

"You measure the joke by the number of moans and the loudness of the groans around the table," the founder explains.

The key to a good Christmas cracker pun is not the identical as a good joke in itself. It is entirely about the setting - in this instance, the shared laughter of the Christmas meal with elders, kids and possibly neighbours.

"You want the joke to be a thing that brings the eight-year-old together with the 80-year-old," she states.

The Neuroscience Of Communal Laughter

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

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

Shared laughter, she explains, aids in forge and strengthen social connections between individuals.

Researchers have found that a absence of such social exchanges can significantly harm both psychological and bodily health.

"Those you talk to, and share laughter with, it leads to enhanced amounts of 'happy chemical' release," the professor adds.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to pleasurable activities, such as chuckling with loved ones over a particularly terrible Christmas cracker joke.

"You're not just chuckling at a foolish pun with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are in fact performing a lot of the truly vital work of building, preserving the social bonds you have with the people you love."

What Happens Inside the Mind?

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

An awful lot occurs in response to comedy, it turns out.

Employing brain scanning technology, a kind of neural imager which shows which parts of the brain are working harder, researchers have been able to map the areas that receive more blood.

The research entails imaging the brains of volunteer participants and then subjecting them to a collection of humorous words, paired with either a neutral sound, or recorded laughter.

"During the study we got a really interesting pattern of neural activity," says the professor.

A gag stimulates not just the areas of the mind responsible for auditory processing and interpreting language, but also neural regions involved in both preparation and starting movement and those linked to vision and recall.

Put all of this as a whole, and people hearing a pun have a sophisticated set of neural reactions that support the laughter we hear.

The Infectious Power of Chuckles

Researchers discovered that when a funny word is combined with laughter there is a greater response in the mind than the same word when followed by a neutral sound.

"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would use to contort your face into a smile or a chuckle," the professor says.

It means people are not just reacting to funny jokes, they are reacting to the laughter that follows them.

Amusement, says the expert, can be contagious.

So what does this imply for the laughter heard around a Christmas gathering?

"People laugh harder when you are familiar with people," she notes, "and you laugh further when you are fond of them or love them."

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

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

The Quest for the Perfect Cracker Joke

Is it possible to discover the perfect gag?

Likely not, but that has not stopped experts from attempting to.

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

Over 40,000 gags submitted, with ratings provided by hundreds of thousands of people globally, he has a clearer idea than most as to what works and what does not.

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

"They must also be bad gags, puns that make us groan," he continues.

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

"This is because if nobody laughs – it's the joke's shortcoming, not your own.

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

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