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

This joke is met by groans that resonate through a storage facility in London.

This describes a joke-testing session with a firm that produces products for gatherings. Its repertoire includes festive crackers.

The company's owner smiles, nearly sheepishly at the joke. But the pun has made the cut and will feature in upcoming crackers.

"You measure the joke by the volume of moans and the intensity of the groans around the table," she says.

The secret to a great holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a good gag in itself. It is all about the setting - in this case, the communal amusement of the holiday dinner table with grandparents, children and potentially friends.

"The goal is for the gag to be something that brings the child in harmony with the grandparent," she states.

The Science Behind Shared Laughter

Coming together to enjoy 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 very likely a truly ancient mammal social sound," explains a neuroscience expert.

Communal amusement, she says, helps make and maintain social connections between individuals.

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

"The people you converse with, and laugh with, it results in increased amounts of endorphin uptake," she continues.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in reaction to enjoyable experiences, such as chuckling with friends over a truly terrible Christmas cracker gag.

"It's not simply laughing at a silly pun with a Christmas cracker," the expert says. "You are in fact performing a lot of the really vital work of building, preserving the connections you have with those you love."

Which Happens Inside the Mind?

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

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

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of neural imager which shows which areas of the mind are working harder, scientists have been able to chart the regions that receive more blood.

Testing involves scanning the minds of volunteer subjects and then subjecting them to a database of funny words, paired with either a neutral sound, or recorded chuckles.

"During the study we observed a very fascinating activation pattern of activation," notes the professor.

A joke activates not just the parts of the mind in charge of auditory processing and interpreting speech, but also neural regions involved in both planning and initiating movement and those linked to vision and recall.

Put all of this together, and individuals hearing a joke have a complex set of neural responses that support the amusement we experience.

The Infectious Nature of Laughter

Researchers found that when a humorous phrase is paired with chuckles there is a stronger reaction in the mind than the identical word when accompanied by a neutral sound.

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

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

Laughter, according to the professor, can be contagious.

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

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

When it comes to Christmas cracker jokes, she explains, the feel-good effect is more likely to be caused not by the joke in itself, but from the reaction to it.

"It's the laughter. The gag is the terrible holiday cracker joke, and it's just a reason to laugh together."

The Search for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever discover the ultimate gag?

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

In 2001, a psychologist set up a research search for the planet's most humorous gag.

More than tens of thousands of gags later, with scores provided by hundreds of thousands of participants globally, he has a clearer idea than many as to what works and what does not.

The perfect festive cracker pun must be brief, he explains.

"They must also need to be poor gags, puns that cause us to groan," he adds.

The increasingly "awful" the joke, he says the more effective.

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

"The fascinating part about the holiday cracker puns is that not one person find them humorous.

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