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

This quip is met by groans that echo through a storage facility in the capital.

We're at a joke-testing meeting with a firm that makes supplies for gatherings. Its catalogue includes Christmas crackers.

The firm's owner smiles, nearly apologetically at the gag. But the pun has made the cut and will appear in upcoming crackers.

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

The secret to a great holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a good joke per se. It is entirely about the context - in this case, the communal laughter of the Christmas dinner table 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 adds.

The Science Of Shared Laughter

Coming together to experience communal amusement is not only nothing new, scientists argue, it is probably to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are chuckling with people at the holiday table you are engaging in what's almost certainly a really primordial mammalian social vocalisation," explains a professor.

Shared laughter, she says, helps forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals.

Researchers have discovered that a absence of these social exchanges can seriously damage mental and physical health.

"The people you talk to, and share laughter with, it results in increased amounts of endorphin uptake," she adds.

Endorphins are the body's "feel-good compounds" and are produced both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in response to enjoyable activities, such as laughing with loved ones over a truly terrible festive cracker joke.

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly pun with a Christmas cracker," the expert says. "You are in fact performing a lot of the really important work of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

What Happens Inside the Brain?

But what is actually happening inside the mind when we hear a joke?

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

Using brain scanning technology, a type of neural imager which shows which parts of the brain are more active, researchers have been able to map the areas that receive more blood flow.

The research involves scanning the minds of healthy participants and then exposing them to a collection of funny phrases, paired with either a neutral sound, or recorded chuckles.

"During the study we got a really interesting pattern of activation," notes the professor.

A joke stimulates not just the parts of the brain responsible for auditory processing and interpreting language, but also neural regions associated with both preparation and initiating motion and those linked to sight and memory.

Combine all of this together, and people hearing a pun have a complex series of brain responses that support the laughter we experience.

The Contagious Nature of Chuckles

Scientists found that when a humorous phrase is combined with laughter there is a stronger reaction in the brain than the same word when followed by a neutral sound.

"This activation occurred in parts of the mind that you would employ to contort your expression into a grin or a chuckle," she says.

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

Amusement, says the professor, can be infectious.

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

"You laugh harder when you are familiar with people," she says, "and you laugh further when you are fond of them or care for them."

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she says, the positive factor is more probable to be triggered not by the gag itself, but from the response to it.

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

The Quest for the Ideal Festive Pun

Is it possible to find the ultimate gag?

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

In 2001, a professor set up a scientific project for the planet's funniest gag.

More than tens of thousands of gags later, with ratings lodged by hundreds of thousands of participants around the world, he has a better idea than many as to what succeeds and what fails.

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

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

The increasingly "awful" the gag, he says the better.

"This is because if no-one finds it funny – it's the gag's shortcoming, not your own.

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

"It creates a common moment around the gathering and I think it's lovely."