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"What was the price did Santa's sleigh cost? Zero, it was on the house."

This quip is greeted with groans that echo through a storage facility in the capital.

We're at a humor-evaluation meeting with a firm that produces supplies for social events. Its repertoire includes festive crackers.

The company's founder smiles, almost sheepishly at the gag. But the pun has been selected and will appear in future crackers.

"The success is gauged by the joke by the volume of moans and the loudness of the groans at the table," she says.

The key to a great holiday cracker pun is not the same as a good gag per se. It is entirely about the setting - in this case, the communal laughter of the holiday meal with elders, children and possibly friends.

"You want the gag to be something that unites the eight-year-old together with the 80-year-old," she states.

The Neuroscience Behind Communal Laughter

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

"So when you are chuckling with others around the holiday dinner you are dropping into what's almost certainly a really ancient mammal play sound," says a neuroscience expert.

Communal laughter, she says, aids in make and maintain social bonds between people.

Scientists have found that a absence of these interactions can seriously harm mental and physical well-being.

"The people you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to increased levels of endorphin release," she adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to enjoyable activities, such as chuckling with friends over a particularly terrible festive cracker gag.

"It's not simply laughing at a foolish joke with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are actually doing a lot of the really vital task of building, preserving the connections you have with the people you love."

Which Happens In the Mind?

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

An awful lot happens in reaction to humour, it transpires.

Using brain scanning technology, a type of neural imager which shows which areas of the brain are more active, researchers have been able to map the areas that get more blood flow.

Testing involves scanning the minds of volunteer subjects and then subjecting them to a database of humorous phrases, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded chuckles.

"In the scanner we observed a really interesting activation pattern of neural activity," says the professor.

A gag stimulates not just the areas of the mind in charge of auditory processing and interpreting language, but also neural regions associated with both planning and initiating movement and those linked to sight and memory.

Combine all of this together, and people hearing a pun have a complex set of brain reactions that underpin the amusement we hear.

The Contagious Nature of Laughter

Scientists found that when a humorous word is paired with laughter there is a greater response in the brain than the identical phrase when accompanied by a neutral sound.

"This was in parts of the mind that you would use to contort your face into a smile or a chuckle," the professor says.

It means we are not just reacting to humorous jokes, they are reacting to the laughter that accompanies them.

Laughter, says the professor, can be contagious.

So what does this imply for the laughter found around a Christmas gathering?

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

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

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

The Search for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever discover the perfect gag?

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

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

Over tens of thousands of gags later, with ratings provided by hundreds of thousands of people globally, he has a clearer idea than many as to what succeeds and what does not.

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

"But they also need to be poor jokes, puns that make us groan," he continues.

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

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

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

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