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

This quip is greeted with moans that resonate through a warehouse in London.

This describes a humor-evaluation meeting with a firm that makes products for social events. Its repertoire features Christmas crackers.

The firm's founder smiles, nearly sheepishly at the joke. But the pun has been selected and will feature in upcoming crackers.

"You measure the gag by the number of groans and the intensity of the groans around the table," the founder says.

The secret to a great holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a good gag per se. It is entirely about the context - in this case, the communal amusement of the Christmas dinner table with grandparents, kids and possibly neighbours.

"You want the joke to be something that brings the child together with the 80-year-old," she adds.

The Neuroscience Of Shared Amusement

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

"So when you are laughing with others around the Christmas dinner you are engaging in what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammalian social vocalisation," explains a professor.

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

Scientists have found that a lack of such interactions can seriously harm both psychological and bodily health.

"Those you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to enhanced amounts of endorphin uptake," she adds.

These natural chemicals are the body's "happy chemicals" and are released both to reduce stress and pain and in reaction to pleasurable experiences, such as laughing with loved ones over a truly terrible festive cracker joke.

"It's not simply chuckling at a foolish joke with a holiday cracker," the expert says. "You are in fact performing a lot of the really vital work of building, preserving the social bonds you have with those you love."

Which Occurs Inside the Mind?

But what is truly happening within the mind when we listen to a joke?

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

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of neural imager which indicates which areas of the mind are more active, researchers have been able to map the regions that get more blood flow.

The research involves scanning the brains of healthy subjects and then subjecting them to a database of funny phrases, paired with either a neutral sound, or recorded chuckles.

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

A gag activates 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 linked to vision and memory.

Combine all of this as a whole, and individuals listening to a joke have a complex series of neural responses that underpin the amusement we hear.

The Contagious Power of Chuckles

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

"This activation occurred in areas of the mind that you would use to contort your expression into a smile or a chuckle," she says.

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

Laughter, according to the professor, can be contagious.

So what does this imply for the laughter heard around a holiday gathering?

"You laugh more when you know others," she says, "and laughter increases more when you are fond of them or care for them."

When it comes to Christmas cracker puns, she explains, the positive factor is more likely to be triggered not by the joke in itself, but from the reaction to it.

"It's the laughter. The gag is the terrible Christmas cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to laugh together."

The Quest for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever discover the ultimate joke?

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

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

More than tens of thousands of jokes later, with scores provided by 350,000 people globally, he has a better understanding than most as to what succeeds and what fails.

The ideal festive cracker pun must be short, he says.

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

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

"The reason is that if nobody finds it funny – it's the joke's shortcoming, not your own.

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

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