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

This joke is greeted with moans that echo through a storage facility in the capital.

We're at a humor-evaluation session with a company that produces products for gatherings. Its repertoire features festive crackers.

The company's founder smiles, nearly sheepishly at the joke. But the joke has been selected and will appear in future crackers.

"The success is gauged by the gag by the number of moans and the intensity of the groans at the table," she explains.

The key to a great Christmas cracker joke is not the same as a good joke in itself. It is entirely about the setting - in this case, the shared laughter of the holiday dinner table with grandparents, children and possibly neighbours.

"You want the joke to be something that brings the eight-year-old together with the grandparent," she states.

The Science Of Shared Amusement

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

"Therefore when you are chuckling with people at the holiday table you are engaging in what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammal social sound," explains a neuroscience expert.

Communal laughter, she explains, aids in forge and strengthen social bonds between people.

Researchers have found that a lack of these interactions can seriously harm both psychological and bodily well-being.

"The people you talk to, and laugh with, it leads to enhanced amounts of endorphin uptake," the professor continues.

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

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly joke with a holiday cracker," she says. "You are in fact performing a lot of the truly important work of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you love."

What Happens In the Brain?

But what is truly taking place within the mind when we hear a gag?

A tremendous amount happens in reaction to humour, it transpires.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of neural imager which shows which areas of the mind are working harder, researchers have been able to chart the areas that receive more blood flow.

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

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

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

Combine all of this as a whole, and people listening to a pun have a complex series of neural reactions that support the amusement we experience.

The Infectious Power of Laughter

Researchers found that when a funny phrase is combined with laughter there is a greater response in the brain than the same word when followed by a non-emotional sound.

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

It means people are not just reacting to humorous jokes, they are reacting to the amusement that accompanies them.

Laughter, says the professor, can be contagious.

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

"You laugh more when you know others," she says, "and laughter increases further when you are fond of them or love them."

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

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

The Search for the Perfect Festive Pun

Is it possible to discover the perfect gag?

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

Years ago, a professor set up a scientific project for the world's most humorous gag.

Over tens of thousands of gags submitted, with ratings provided by 350,000 people globally, he has a better understanding than many as to what works and what does not.

The perfect festive cracker pun must be brief, he explains.

"But they also be poor gags, puns that make us moan," he continues.

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

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

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

"It creates a common experience at the gathering and I believe it's lovely."