🔗 Share this article

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

This one-liner is greeted with moans that echo through a storage facility in the capital.

We're at a joke-testing session with a firm that produces products for gatherings. Its repertoire includes festive crackers.

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

"You measure the gag by the volume of groans and the loudness of the groans around the table," she says.

The secret to a good holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a good gag in itself. It is all about the setting - in this instance, the communal laughter of the Christmas meal with elders, children and possibly friends.

"The goal is for the gag to be a thing that brings the child in harmony with the grandparent," she states.

The Science Of Shared Amusement

Gathering to enjoy shared laughter is not only nothing new, scientists argue, it is probably to be older than humanity.

"Therefore when you are chuckling with others around the holiday dinner you are dropping into what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammal play vocalisation," says a neuroscience expert.

Shared laughter, she explains, helps make and maintain social bonds between people.

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

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

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

"You're not just laughing at a foolish pun with a holiday cracker," the expert says. "You are actually performing a lot of the truly vital work of building, preserving the connections you have with the people you love."

What Happens Inside the Mind?

But what is actually taking place within the brain when we listen to a joke?

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

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

Testing involves imaging the brains of healthy subjects and then exposing them to a collection of funny words, paired with either a neutral sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

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

A joke stimulates not just the parts of the brain in charge of auditory processing and interpreting speech, but also neural regions associated with both preparation and starting movement and those linked to vision and recall.

Put all of this together, and individuals listening to a joke have a sophisticated series of neural reactions that support the amusement we hear.

The Infectious Nature of Chuckles

Scientists discovered that when a funny word is combined with laughter there is a greater response in the brain than the same word when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

"This was in parts of the mind that you would employ to move your face into a grin or a laugh," she explains.

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

Laughter, according to the expert, can be contagious.

So what does this imply for the chuckles heard at a holiday table?

"People laugh harder when you know others," she says, "and you laugh further when you like them or love them."

When it comes to Christmas cracker puns, she says, the positive effect is more likely to be caused not by the joke in itself, but from the reaction to it.

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

The Search for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Will we ever discover the ultimate gag?

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

Years ago, a psychologist established a research search for the planet's most humorous joke.

More than tens of thousands of jokes submitted, with ratings provided by 350,000 people around the world, he has a clearer understanding than most as to what works and what fails.

The ideal festive cracker joke must be short, he explains.

"But they also be bad gags, puns that make us moan," he adds.

The increasingly "awful" the gag, he says 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 holiday cracker puns is that not one person find them funny.

"That's a shared experience at the gathering and I believe it's lovely."