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

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

We're at a joke-testing session with a firm that makes supplies for gatherings. Its catalogue features festive crackers.

The firm's owner grins, almost apologetically at the joke. But the joke has been selected and will appear in upcoming crackers.

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

The key to a great holiday cracker joke is not the same as a stand-up joke per se. It is entirely about the context - in this instance, the shared amusement of the holiday meal with elders, kids and potentially neighbours.

"You want the joke to be something that unites the child together with the grandparent," she adds.

The Neuroscience Of Shared Amusement

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

"Therefore when you are laughing with others at the Christmas dinner you are engaging in what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammalian play vocalisation," says a professor.

Shared amusement, she explains, helps forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals.

Researchers have discovered that a lack of such social exchanges can seriously damage both psychological and bodily health.

"The people you talk to, and share laughter with, it leads to enhanced levels of endorphin uptake," she adds.

Endorphins are the body's "feel-good compounds" and are produced both to reduce stress and pain and in response to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with friends over a particularly terrible festive cracker joke.

"You're not just laughing at a foolish joke with a holiday cracker," the expert says. "You are actually performing a lot of the really important task of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you love."

What Happens In the Mind?

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

A tremendous amount occurs in response to comedy, it turns out.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of neural imager which indicates which areas of the mind are working harder, researchers have been able to chart the areas that get more blood.

The research involves scanning the minds of healthy participants and then subjecting them to a database of funny phrases, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or recorded laughter.

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

A gag stimulates not just the areas of the brain in charge of hearing and understanding language, but also brain regions associated with both preparation and initiating motion and those linked to vision and memory.

Put all of this as a whole, and individuals hearing a joke have a complex set of brain responses that support the amusement we experience.

The Infectious Nature of Chuckles

Researchers found that when a funny word is paired with chuckles there is a greater response in the brain than the identical word when followed by a non-emotional sound.

"This was in areas of the mind that you would use to move your face into a grin or a chuckle," she explains.

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

Amusement, says the expert, can be infectious.

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

"People laugh harder when you know people," she notes, "and you laugh further when you are fond of them or love them."

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

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

The Quest for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Will we ever find the ultimate joke?

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

In 2001, a psychologist set up a research search for the world's funniest joke.

Over 40,000 gags later, with scores lodged by hundreds of thousands of people globally, he has a clearer understanding than many as to what succeeds and what does not.

The perfect Christmas cracker joke needs to be brief, he explains.

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

The increasingly "terrible" the gag, he says the better.

"This is because if no-one finds it funny – it's the gag's fault, not yours.

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

"It creates a shared experience at the gathering and I think it's lovely."