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

This one-liner is greeted with groans that echo through a storage facility in London.

This describes a humor-evaluation meeting with a firm that produces supplies for social events. Its catalogue features festive crackers.

The company's founder smiles, almost apologetically at the joke. But the joke has made the cut and will appear in upcoming crackers.

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

The key to a good holiday cracker joke is not the same as a good joke in itself. It is entirely about the setting - in this case, the communal amusement of the holiday meal with grandparents, kids and possibly neighbours.

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

The Science Behind Shared Laughter

Gathering to experience shared amusement is not only ancient, experts argue, it is probably to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are laughing with people at the holiday table you are dropping into what's almost certainly a really ancient mammalian social vocalisation," says a neuroscience expert.

Shared laughter, she says, aids in forge and strengthen social connections between people.

Researchers have discovered that a lack of these social exchanges can significantly harm mental and physical well-being.

"Those you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to increased amounts of 'happy chemical' uptake," she continues.

These natural chemicals are the body's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in response to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with friends over a truly terrible Christmas cracker gag.

"You're not just laughing at a silly pun with a holiday cracker," the expert states. "You are in fact doing a lot of the really important task of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

Which Occurs In the Mind?

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

A tremendous amount happens in response to humour, it turns out.

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

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

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

A gag stimulates not just the areas of the brain in charge of auditory processing and interpreting speech, but also brain regions associated with both planning and initiating movement and those involved in vision and memory.

Combine these elements together, and people listening to a pun have a sophisticated series of brain reactions that support the laughter we experience.

The Contagious Nature of Laughter

Researchers discovered that when a funny phrase is combined with laughter there is a greater reaction in the brain than the identical word when followed by a non-emotional sound.

"This was in parts of the brain that you would employ to contort your expression into a smile or a laugh," the professor says.

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

Amusement, says the expert, can be contagious.

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

"People laugh more when you are familiar with others," she says, "and laughter increases further when you like them or care for them."

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she explains, the positive factor is more probable to be triggered not by the joke in itself, but from the response to it.

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

The Search for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Is it possible to find the perfect gag?

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

Years ago, a psychologist established a scientific project for the world's funniest gag.

More than 40,000 gags later, with ratings lodged by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, he has a clearer idea than many as to what works and what fails.

The ideal Christmas cracker pun must be brief, he says.

"They must also be bad gags, puns that make us moan," he continues.

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

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

"What's interesting about the Christmas cracker puns is that none of us find them funny.

"That's a shared moment at the gathering and I believe it's lovely."