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"How much did Santa's sleigh cost? Nothing, it was on the house."

This one-liner is met by groans that echo through a storage facility in London.

We're at a humor-evaluation meeting with a firm that produces products for gatherings. Its catalogue includes festive crackers.

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

"You measure the gag by the volume of moans and the loudness of the groans at the table," the founder explains.

The secret to a great Christmas cracker pun is not the same as a good joke per se. It is all about the setting - in this instance, the shared amusement of the Christmas dinner table with grandparents, children and possibly neighbours.

"The goal is for the joke to be a thing that unites the eight-year-old together with the 80-year-old," she adds.

The Neuroscience Of Shared Amusement

Coming together to enjoy shared laughter is not only nothing new, experts say, it is probably to be pre-human.

"So when you are chuckling with others at the holiday dinner you are dropping into what's almost certainly a really primordial mammal social vocalisation," explains a neuroscience expert.

Communal laughter, she explains, aids in forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals.

Researchers have discovered that a absence of these social exchanges can significantly harm both psychological and bodily well-being.

"The people you converse with, and share laughter with, it results in enhanced amounts of endorphin release," she adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are produced both to reduce stress and pain and in reaction to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with loved ones over a truly awful Christmas cracker gag.

"It's not simply chuckling at a foolish joke with a holiday cracker," the expert states. "You are actually performing a lot of the truly vital task of building, preserving the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

What Occurs Inside the Mind?

But what is truly taking place inside the mind when we hear a joke?

An awful lot occurs in response to humour, it turns out.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of brain scanner which shows which parts of the mind are more active, researchers have been able to map the regions that receive more blood.

The research entails scanning the minds of healthy subjects and then exposing them to a database of humorous words, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we got a very fascinating activation pattern of activation," notes the neuroscientist.

A gag activates not just the parts of the brain responsible for auditory processing and interpreting language, but also neural areas involved in both preparation and initiating movement and those involved in sight and recall.

Combine these elements as a whole, and people listening to a pun have a complex set of neural reactions that support the amusement we experience.

The Contagious Nature of Laughter

Scientists found that when a humorous word is paired with chuckles there is a greater response in the mind than the same word when followed by a non-emotional sound.

"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would employ to move your face into a smile or a laugh," she explains.

It indicates people are not just responding to funny jokes, they are responding to the laughter that accompanies them.

Amusement, according to the expert, can be contagious.

So what does this mean for the chuckles heard around a Christmas table?

"People laugh harder when you are familiar with others," she says, "and laughter increases further when you like them or love them."

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

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

The Search for the Ideal Festive Pun

Will we ever find the perfect joke?

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

In 2001, a psychologist established a research project for the world's most humorous joke.

Over 40,000 jokes later, with scores lodged by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, he has a better idea than many as to what works and what does not.

The ideal Christmas cracker pun needs to be short, he says.

"They must also need to be poor gags, jokes that cause us to moan," he continues.

The increasingly "awful" the joke, he says the more effective.

"This is because if no-one laughs – it's the joke's shortcoming, not yours.

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

"That's a common moment at the gathering and I think it's wonderful."