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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 resonate through a warehouse in the capital.

This describes a joke-testing session with a company that makes products for social events. Its catalogue features festive crackers.

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

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

The secret to a great holiday cracker pun is not the same as a stand-up joke in itself. It is all about the context - in this instance, the communal amusement of the holiday dinner table with grandparents, kids and potentially neighbours.

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

The Science Of Shared Amusement

Coming together to experience communal laughter is not only ancient, experts argue, it is likely to be older than humanity.

"Therefore when you are laughing with people at the holiday dinner you are dropping into what's almost certainly a really ancient mammal social sound," explains a professor.

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

Scientists have found that a absence of such social exchanges can significantly damage mental and physical well-being.

"The people you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to increased amounts of 'happy chemical' uptake," she adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are released both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in reaction to enjoyable activities, such as chuckling with friends over a truly terrible festive cracker joke.

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly pun with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are actually performing a lot of the truly vital task of building, preserving the social bonds you have with those you love."

What Happens Inside the Mind?

But what is actually happening inside the brain when we hear a gag?

An awful lot happens in reaction to comedy, it turns out.

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

Testing involves scanning the brains of healthy participants and then subjecting them to a collection of humorous words, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we got a really interesting activation pattern of activation," notes the neuroscientist.

A gag stimulates not just the parts of the brain responsible for hearing and understanding language, but also brain regions involved in both preparation and initiating motion and those involved in vision and memory.

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

The Infectious Nature of Laughter

Researchers found that when a funny word is combined with laughter there is a stronger response in the mind than the same word when accompanied by a neutral sound.

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

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

Laughter, says the expert, can be infectious.

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

"People laugh more when you know people," she says, "and you laugh further when you like them or care for them."

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

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

The Quest for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever discover the ultimate joke?

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

Years ago, a professor set up a research project for the planet's funniest joke.

Over tens of thousands of gags later, with ratings lodged by 350,000 people globally, he has a better understanding than most as to what succeeds and what fails.

The perfect Christmas cracker pun needs to be short, he says.

"But they also be bad gags, puns that cause us to moan," he adds.

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

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

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

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