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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 moans that resonate through a storage facility in the capital.

This describes a joke-testing session with a firm that produces products for social events. Its repertoire features festive crackers.

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

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

The key to a good Christmas cracker pun is not the identical as a stand-up joke per se. It is all about the setting - in this case, the communal laughter of the Christmas dinner table with elders, children and possibly friends.

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

The Neuroscience Behind Shared Amusement

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

"So when you are laughing with people at the Christmas dinner you are engaging in what's very likely a really ancient mammalian social vocalisation," explains a neuroscience expert.

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

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

"Those you talk to, and share laughter with, it leads to enhanced levels of endorphin uptake," she continues.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with friends over a truly terrible Christmas cracker joke.

"You're not just laughing at a foolish pun with a holiday cracker," the expert states. "You are actually performing a lot of the truly vital task of building, preserving the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

What Occurs Inside the Mind?

But what is truly taking place inside the mind when we hear a joke?

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

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of neural imager which shows which parts of the brain are more active, researchers have been able to map the regions that get more blood.

The research involves scanning the minds of healthy subjects and then exposing them to a collection of funny phrases, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or recorded chuckles.

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

A gag stimulates not just the areas of the mind in charge of auditory processing and interpreting speech, but also brain areas involved in both preparation and starting movement and those involved in sight and recall.

Combine all of this as a whole, and people hearing a joke have a complex set of neural responses that support the laughter we hear.

The Infectious Nature of Laughter

Scientists found that when a funny word is paired with chuckles there is a greater response in the mind than the same word when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

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

It indicates people are not just responding to humorous words, they are responding to the amusement that follows them.

Laughter, according to the professor, can be contagious.

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

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

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she says, the feel-good factor is more probable to be caused not by the gag itself, but from the reaction to it.

"It's the laughter. The gag is the terrible Christmas cracker joke, and it's just a reason to chuckle as a group."

The Quest for the Ideal Festive Pun

Will we ever discover the ultimate joke?

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

In 2001, a psychologist established a scientific project for the world's funniest gag.

Over tens of thousands of gags submitted, with scores provided by hundreds of thousands of participants globally, he has a better understanding than most as to what succeeds and what fails.

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

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

The more "terrible" the gag, he states the more effective.

"This is because if no-one laughs – it's the joke's shortcoming, not yours.

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

"That's a shared experience around the gathering and I think it's wonderful."