🔗 Share this article

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

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

This describes a humor-evaluation meeting with a company that produces products for gatherings. Its repertoire includes Christmas crackers.

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

"The success is gauged by the joke by the volume of moans and the loudness of the groans at the table," the founder explains.

The secret to a great holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a stand-up gag per se. It is entirely about the context - in this instance, the shared amusement of the Christmas dinner table with grandparents, kids and potentially friends.

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

The Science Behind Shared Laughter

Gathering to enjoy shared laughter is not only ancient, scientists say, it is likely to be pre-human.

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

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

Researchers have discovered that a absence of these interactions can seriously harm mental and physical well-being.

"Those you talk to, and laugh with, it results in increased levels of endorphin uptake," she continues.

Endorphins are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are released both to reduce stress and pain and in reaction to pleasurable activities, such as laughing with friends over a particularly terrible Christmas cracker gag.

"You're not just laughing at a foolish pun with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are in fact performing a lot of the really vital task of making, maintaining the connections you have with the people you love."

Which Occurs In the Mind?

But what is actually happening inside the brain when we hear a joke?

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

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of neural imager which indicates which parts of the mind are more active, researchers have been able to map the regions that get more blood flow.

The research entails scanning the minds of healthy subjects and then exposing them to a collection of humorous words, accompanied by either a neutral sound, or recorded chuckles.

"In the scanner we got a very interesting pattern of activation," notes the professor.

A gag stimulates not just the parts of the mind responsible for hearing and understanding speech, but also neural areas associated with both planning and starting motion and those involved in sight and recall.

Combine these elements as a whole, and people listening to a joke have a complex set of brain reactions that underpin the amusement we experience.

The Infectious Nature of Chuckles

Scientists discovered that when a funny word is paired with laughter there is a stronger reaction in the brain than the same phrase when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would use to move your face into a grin or a laugh," the professor says.

It means people are not just responding to humorous jokes, they are responding to the amusement that accompanies them.

Amusement, according to the expert, can be infectious.

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

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

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she explains, the positive factor is more probable to be triggered not by the gag in itself, but from the response to it.

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

The Search for the Ideal Festive Pun

Will we ever discover the ultimate gag?

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

In 2001, a professor established a research search for the world's funniest joke.

Over 40,000 gags later, with ratings lodged by 350,000 people globally, he has a clearer idea than most as to what succeeds and what does not.

The perfect festive cracker pun must be short, he says.

"They must also be bad jokes, puns that make us groan," he continues.

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

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

"The fascinating part about the holiday cracker puns is that not one person find them funny.

"It creates a shared moment around the table and I think it's lovely."