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

This one-liner is greeted with groans that resonate through a warehouse in the capital.

This describes a humor-evaluation session with a firm that makes products for gatherings. Its repertoire includes Christmas crackers.

The firm's owner smiles, nearly sheepishly at the gag. But the pun has made the cut and will feature in future crackers.

"You measure the gag by the volume of groans and the loudness of the groans around the table," the founder says.

The key to a good holiday cracker joke is not the same as a good gag in itself. It is all about the context - in this case, the communal laughter of the Christmas meal with grandparents, children and potentially neighbours.

"You want the gag to be a thing that brings the child together with the grandparent," she adds.

The Neuroscience Behind Communal Laughter

Gathering to enjoy communal amusement is not only nothing new, experts say, it is likely to be pre-human.

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

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

Researchers have discovered that a absence of such interactions can significantly damage both psychological and bodily well-being.

"Those you talk to, and laugh with, it leads to enhanced levels of 'happy chemical' uptake," the professor adds.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to alleviate stress and pain and in reaction to pleasurable experiences, such as laughing with friends over a particularly terrible Christmas cracker gag.

"You're not just laughing at a foolish pun with a Christmas cracker," the expert states. "You are in fact performing a lot of the truly important work of making, maintaining the connections you have with those you care about."

What Happens Inside the Mind?

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

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

Employing brain scanning technology, a type of neural imager which shows which areas of the brain are more active, researchers have been able to chart the regions that get more blood flow.

Testing entails imaging the minds of healthy subjects and then exposing them to a database of funny phrases, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or recorded chuckles.

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

A gag stimulates not just the parts of the mind responsible for hearing and understanding speech, but also brain areas involved in both preparation and initiating movement and those linked to vision and memory.

Put all of this as a whole, and individuals hearing a pun have a sophisticated series of brain reactions that support the amusement we experience.

The Infectious Power of Chuckles

Scientists discovered that when a funny word is combined with laughter there is a stronger response in the mind than the identical word when followed by a neutral sound.

"This activation occurred in areas of the mind that you would use to move your expression into a grin or a laugh," the professor explains.

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

Laughter, says the expert, can be contagious.

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

"You laugh harder when you are familiar with others," she says, "and you laugh further when you like them or love them."

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

"The laughter is key. The gag is the terrible holiday cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to chuckle together."

The Search for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever find the ultimate gag?

Likely not, but that has not stopped researchers from trying to.

Years ago, a psychologist set up a research project for the world's most humorous gag.

Over 40,000 jokes later, with scores lodged by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, he has a better understanding than many as to what works and what does not.

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

"But they also be poor gags, jokes that make us moan," he adds.

The increasingly "awful" the joke, he states the better.

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

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

"It creates a shared experience at the table and I believe it's wonderful."