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"What was the price did Santa's sled cost? Nothing, it was on the house."

This quip is greeted with groans that echo through a warehouse in London.

This describes a humor-evaluation session with a company that produces products for social events. Its repertoire features Christmas crackers.

The firm's founder smiles, nearly sheepishly at the joke. But the joke has made the cut and will appear in upcoming crackers.

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

The key to a great holiday cracker joke is not the same as a good joke per se. It is all about the setting - in this case, the communal amusement of the Christmas dinner table with elders, kids and possibly neighbours.

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

The Neuroscience Of Shared Laughter

Coming together to enjoy communal laughter is not only nothing new, experts say, it is probably to be older than humanity.

"Therefore when you are chuckling with people around the Christmas dinner you are engaging in what's very likely a truly primordial mammalian play vocalisation," says a professor.

Shared laughter, she says, aids in forge and strengthen social connections between people.

Researchers have found that a lack of such social exchanges can significantly damage mental and physical health.

"Those you converse with, and share laughter with, it results in increased levels of endorphin uptake," the professor adds.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to alleviate stress and pain and in reaction to enjoyable activities, such as laughing with friends over a particularly awful Christmas cracker joke.

"You're not just laughing at a silly pun with a holiday cracker," she says. "You are actually performing a lot of the really important task of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

Which Happens In the Mind?

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

A tremendous amount happens in response to humour, it transpires.

Employing brain scanning technology, a kind of neural imager which shows which areas of the mind are working harder, scientists have been able to chart the areas that receive more blood flow.

The research entails scanning the brains of volunteer participants and then subjecting them to a collection of humorous phrases, accompanied by either a neutral sound, or recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we observed a really interesting pattern of activation," notes the professor.

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

Combine these elements as a whole, and individuals hearing a pun have a sophisticated set of brain reactions that underpin the laughter we hear.

The Infectious Power of Chuckles

Researchers discovered that when a funny word is paired with laughter there is a stronger response in the mind than the identical word when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would use to contort your face into a smile or a laugh," she says.

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

Amusement, says the expert, can be contagious.

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

"You laugh harder when you are familiar with others," she notes, "and laughter increases more when you are fond of them or love them."

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she explains, the feel-good factor is more likely to be caused not by the joke itself, but from the reaction to it.

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

The Search for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Will we ever find the perfect joke?

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

Years ago, a professor established a research search for the world's funniest gag.

More than tens of thousands of jokes submitted, with ratings provided by hundreds of thousands of people globally, he has a better understanding than many as to what succeeds and what does not.

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

"But they also need to be bad gags, puns that cause us to moan," he continues.

The more "awful" the gag, he says the better.

"The reason is that if nobody laughs – it's the gag's shortcoming, not yours.

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

"It creates a shared experience at the table and I think it's wonderful."