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

This one-liner is met by groans that echo through a storage facility in the capital.

This describes a humor-evaluation meeting with a company that produces products for gatherings. Its repertoire features festive crackers.

The firm's owner grins, nearly sheepishly at the gag. But the joke has made the cut and will appear in future crackers.

"You measure the joke by the number of groans and the intensity of the groans around the table," she explains.

The secret to a great Christmas cracker pun is not the same as a good joke in itself. It is entirely about the context - in this case, the shared amusement of the Christmas dinner table with elders, kids and possibly friends.

"The goal is for the gag to be something that unites the eight-year-old together with the 80-year-old," she adds.

The Science Of Communal Amusement

Gathering to enjoy communal laughter is not only nothing new, experts argue, it is probably to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are chuckling with others at the Christmas dinner you are engaging in what's almost certainly a really primordial mammal play vocalisation," explains a professor.

Shared amusement, she says, helps forge and strengthen social bonds between people.

Researchers have found that a lack of such interactions can seriously harm both psychological and bodily health.

"The people you talk to, and share laughter with, it leads to increased amounts of 'happy chemical' uptake," the professor adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to enjoyable experiences, such as chuckling with loved ones over a particularly terrible Christmas cracker joke.

"It's not simply laughing at a foolish joke with a holiday cracker," the expert states. "You are actually performing a lot of the really important task of making, maintaining the connections you have with the people you care about."

Which Occurs Inside the Brain?

But what is truly taking place inside the brain when we listen to a joke?

A tremendous amount occurs in reaction to humour, it turns out.

Using brain scanning technology, a type of neural imager which indicates which areas of the mind are more active, scientists have been able to chart the regions that get more blood.

Testing involves scanning the minds of volunteer subjects and then subjecting them to a collection of funny words, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded chuckles.

"In the scanner we observed a very fascinating pattern of activation," says the neuroscientist.

A gag stimulates not just the areas of the brain in charge of hearing and interpreting speech, but also brain areas involved in both planning and initiating motion and those involved in sight and memory.

Combine these elements together, and individuals listening to a pun have a sophisticated series of neural responses that underpin the laughter we experience.

The Contagious Nature of Chuckles

Scientists discovered that when a humorous phrase is paired with chuckles there is a greater reaction in the mind than the identical phrase when accompanied by a neutral sound.

"This activation occurred in parts of the brain that you would use to move your expression into a grin or a chuckle," the professor explains.

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

Amusement, says the professor, can be contagious.

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

"People laugh harder 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 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 gag is the dreadful Christmas cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to laugh as a group."

The Search for the Ideal Festive Pun

Will we ever discover the ultimate gag?

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

In 2001, a professor set up a research search for the world's funniest joke.

Over 40,000 gags later, with ratings lodged by 350,000 people around the world, he has a better idea than many as to what works and what does not.

The ideal festive cracker pun must be short, he says.

"They must also need to be bad gags, puns that make us moan," he adds.

The more "terrible" the gag, he says the better.

"The reason is that if nobody laughs – it's the gag's shortcoming, not your own.

"The fascinating part about the Christmas cracker jokes is that none of us considers them humorous.

"That's a shared moment at the gathering and I think it's lovely."