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

This joke is greeted with moans that resonate through a storage facility in London.

This describes a joke-testing meeting with a firm that makes products for gatherings. Its repertoire includes Christmas crackers.

The company's owner grins, almost sheepishly at the gag. But the pun has made the cut and will feature in upcoming crackers.

"The success is gauged by the gag by the number of groans and the loudness of the groans at the table," she says.

The secret to a good Christmas cracker pun is not the same as a stand-up joke per se. It is all about the context - in this instance, the shared laughter of the holiday dinner table with elders, children and potentially friends.

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

The Science Of Communal Amusement

Coming together to experience communal amusement is not only nothing new, scientists argue, it is likely to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are chuckling with people at the holiday dinner you are engaging in what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammal play sound," explains a neuroscience expert.

Communal amusement, she says, aids in make and maintain social connections between people.

Scientists have found that a absence of such interactions can significantly damage mental and physical well-being.

"Those you converse with, and share laughter with, it leads to increased amounts of endorphin uptake," the professor adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are produced both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in response to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with friends over a truly awful festive cracker joke.

"You're not just chuckling at a silly joke with a Christmas cracker," the expert states. "You are in fact performing a lot of the really vital work of building, preserving the connections you have with those you love."

Which Happens Inside the Mind?

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

An awful lot occurs in response to humour, it transpires.

Employing 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 map the regions that get more blood flow.

The research entails imaging the brains of volunteer subjects and then subjecting them to a collection of humorous phrases, paired with either a neutral sound, or pre-recorded chuckles.

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

A gag activates not just the parts of the brain in charge of hearing and understanding speech, but also neural regions involved in both planning and initiating movement and those linked to sight and memory.

Combine these elements as a whole, and individuals hearing a pun have a sophisticated series of neural reactions that support the amusement we experience.

The Infectious Nature of Laughter

Researchers found that when a funny phrase is combined with laughter there is a stronger response in the brain than the same word when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

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

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

Amusement, according to the expert, can be infectious.

So what does this mean for the laughter heard around a holiday table?

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

When it comes to Christmas cracker puns, she says, the feel-good factor is more probable to be triggered not by the joke itself, but from the reaction to it.

"The laughter is key. The joke is the terrible holiday cracker joke, and it's just a pretext to laugh as a group."

The Quest for the Perfect Festive Pun

Is it possible to find the ultimate joke?

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

Years ago, a professor established a scientific project for the planet's most humorous gag.

Over tens of thousands of gags submitted, with scores provided by hundreds of thousands of participants around the world, he has a better idea than most as to what works and what fails.

The perfect festive cracker joke needs to be short, he explains.

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

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

"The reason is that if no-one finds it funny – it's the gag's shortcoming, not your own.

"What's interesting 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 lovely."