🔗 Share this article

"How much did Father Christmas's sled cost? Zero, it was on the house."

This one-liner is met by groans that resonate through a warehouse in the capital.

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

The firm's founder grins, nearly sheepishly at the gag. But the joke has made the cut and will appear in future crackers.

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

The key to a good holiday cracker joke is not the same as a stand-up joke per se. It is all about the context - in this case, the shared amusement of the holiday meal with grandparents, children and possibly neighbours.

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

The Neuroscience Of Shared Laughter

Coming together to experience communal laughter is not only ancient, scientists say, it is likely to be older than humanity.

"Therefore when you are laughing with others at the Christmas dinner you are dropping into what's almost certainly a really primordial mammalian play sound," explains a professor.

Communal amusement, she says, helps forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals.

Researchers have found that a absence of these interactions can seriously harm both psychological and bodily well-being.

"Those you converse with, and share laughter with, it leads to increased amounts of 'happy chemical' uptake," the professor continues.

Endorphins are the body's "happy chemicals" and are released both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in reaction to enjoyable experiences, such as chuckling with loved ones over a particularly terrible Christmas cracker joke.

"You're not just chuckling at a foolish pun with a Christmas cracker," she states. "You are in fact doing a lot of the really important task of building, preserving the connections you have with the people you love."

What Happens In the Mind?

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

A tremendous amount occurs in reaction to humour, it turns out.

Using brain scanning technology, a kind of neural imager which indicates which areas of the mind are working harder, researchers have been able to chart the regions that receive more blood flow.

The research entails imaging the brains of healthy participants and then exposing them to a database of funny phrases, paired with either a neutral sound, or recorded laughter.

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

A joke stimulates not just the areas of the mind in charge of hearing and understanding speech, but also brain areas associated with both planning and starting movement and those involved in vision and memory.

Put these elements together, and individuals listening to a joke have a sophisticated set of neural responses that support the laughter we hear.

The Contagious Nature of Laughter

Scientists found that when a humorous word is combined with laughter there is a greater reaction in the brain than the same phrase when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

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

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

Amusement, according to the expert, can be infectious.

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

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

When it comes to festive cracker puns, she explains, the feel-good factor is more likely to be triggered not by the joke itself, but from the response to it.

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

The Search for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever find the ultimate joke?

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

In 2001, a psychologist established a research search for the planet's funniest gag.

Over tens of thousands of jokes submitted, with scores lodged by 350,000 people globally, he has a clearer understanding than most as to what succeeds and what fails.

The perfect festive cracker pun needs to be brief, he explains.

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

The more "awful" the gag, he states the better.

"This is because if nobody finds it funny – it's the gag's fault, not your own.

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

"That's a common experience at the gathering and I believe it's wonderful."