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

This one-liner is greeted with moans that echo through a storage facility in the capital.

This describes a joke-testing session with a firm that produces products for gatherings. Its repertoire features festive crackers.

The company's owner smiles, almost apologetically at the joke. But the pun has been selected and will appear in future crackers.

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

The key to a good holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a stand-up gag per se. It is all about the setting - in this instance, the shared amusement of the Christmas meal with elders, children and potentially friends.

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

The Science Of Communal Laughter

Gathering to enjoy communal amusement is not only ancient, scientists argue, it is likely to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are laughing with people at the Christmas table you are engaging in what's very likely a really primordial mammal social sound," says a neuroscience expert.

Communal amusement, she explains, helps make and maintain social connections between individuals.

Scientists have discovered that a absence of such interactions can seriously harm both psychological and bodily health.

"The people you talk to, and laugh with, it leads to enhanced amounts of endorphin uptake," she adds.

These natural chemicals are the body's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in response to enjoyable activities, such as laughing with friends over a truly awful festive cracker joke.

"You're not just laughing at a silly joke with a holiday cracker," the expert states. "You are in fact performing a lot of the really vital task of building, preserving the connections you have with those you care about."

Which Happens In the Brain?

But what is actually taking place within the mind when we listen to a joke?

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

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

The research entails scanning the minds of healthy participants and then exposing them to a collection of humorous words, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded chuckles.

"In the scanner we observed a very fascinating activation pattern of neural activity," notes the neuroscientist.

A gag activates not just the areas of the mind in charge of auditory processing and understanding speech, but also brain regions associated with both planning and initiating motion and those linked to sight and memory.

Put all of this together, and individuals listening to a joke have a complex set of neural reactions that support the amusement we hear.

The Infectious Nature of Chuckles

Scientists found that when a funny word is combined with laughter there is a greater reaction in the mind than the identical word when accompanied by a neutral sound.

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

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

Laughter, says the expert, can be contagious.

So what does this imply for the laughter found around a Christmas table?

"You laugh more when you know others," she says, "and you laugh more when you like them or care for them."

When it comes to Christmas cracker jokes, she explains, the feel-good effect is more probable to be caused not by the gag itself, but from the reaction to it.

"It's the laughter. The joke is the dreadful holiday cracker joke, and it's just a reason to laugh as a group."

The Quest for the Ideal Festive Pun

Is it possible to discover the perfect joke?

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

Years ago, a professor established a scientific search for the world's most humorous gag.

More than tens of thousands of gags submitted, with scores lodged by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, he has a clearer understanding than most as to what succeeds and what fails.

The perfect Christmas cracker joke needs to be brief, he says.

"But they also need to be bad jokes, jokes that cause us to groan," he continues.

The increasingly "terrible" the gag, he states the better.

"This is because if nobody finds it funny – it's the joke's shortcoming, not yours.

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

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