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"What was the price did Father Christmas's sled cost? Nothing, it was on the house."

This quip is greeted with groans that resonate through a storage facility in the capital.

This describes a joke-testing session with a company that produces products for social events. Its catalogue includes Christmas crackers.

The firm's founder grins, almost sheepishly at the gag. But the joke has been selected and will feature in future crackers.

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

The secret to a good holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a stand-up gag in itself. It is all about the setting - in this case, the shared laughter of the holiday meal with elders, children and potentially neighbours.

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

The Neuroscience Behind Shared Laughter

Gathering to experience shared amusement is not only ancient, scientists argue, it is likely to be older than humanity.

"Therefore when you are chuckling with others at the holiday table you are engaging in what's very likely a truly primordial mammalian social vocalisation," explains a neuroscience expert.

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

Scientists have found that a absence of these social exchanges can significantly harm both psychological and bodily well-being.

"The people you converse with, and share laughter with, it results in increased amounts of 'happy chemical' release," she adds.

These natural chemicals are the body's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to reduce tension and discomfort and in response to pleasurable activities, such as laughing with loved ones over a truly awful Christmas cracker joke.

"You're not just laughing at a silly pun with a Christmas cracker," she says. "You are actually performing a lot of the truly important task of building, preserving the connections you have with the people you love."

Which Occurs Inside the Brain?

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

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

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of brain scanner which shows which parts of the brain are more active, scientists have been able to map the regions that get more blood flow.

Testing entails imaging the minds of volunteer participants and then exposing them to a collection of humorous phrases, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded chuckles.

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

A gag stimulates not just the areas of the brain responsible for auditory processing and interpreting language, but also neural areas associated with both planning and starting motion and those linked to sight and memory.

Combine all of this as a whole, and people listening to a pun have a sophisticated series of brain reactions that underpin the amusement we experience.

The Contagious Power of Chuckles

Scientists found that when a humorous phrase is paired with laughter there is a greater reaction in the mind than the same word when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

"This activation occurred in parts of the brain that you would use to move your face into a smile or a chuckle," she explains.

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

Amusement, according to the professor, can be infectious.

So what does this imply for the chuckles found at a Christmas table?

"People laugh harder when you are familiar with people," she says, "and laughter increases more when you like them or love them."

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she explains, the feel-good effect is more probable to be triggered not by the gag in itself, but from the response to it.

"The laughter is key. The joke is the dreadful Christmas cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to chuckle as a group."

The Search for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Will we ever find the perfect gag?

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

In 2001, a professor established a research search for the planet's funniest gag.

More than tens of thousands of jokes submitted, with scores provided by hundreds of thousands of participants globally, he has a better understanding than many as to what works and what does not.

The perfect Christmas cracker joke must be short, he says.

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

The more "terrible" the joke, he states the better.

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

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

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