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

This quip is greeted with groans that resonate through a storage facility in the capital.

We're at a humor-evaluation session with a company that produces products for gatherings. Its catalogue features Christmas crackers.

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

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

The key to a good holiday cracker pun is not the identical as a good gag in itself. It is entirely about the setting - in this instance, the communal amusement of the holiday meal with elders, kids and potentially friends.

"The goal is for the joke to be something that brings the child together with the grandparent," she states.

The Neuroscience Of Communal Laughter

Gathering to enjoy communal laughter is not only nothing new, experts argue, it is likely to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are chuckling with others around the holiday table you are dropping into what's almost certainly a truly ancient mammalian play sound," says a neuroscience expert.

Communal amusement, she explains, helps forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals.

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

"The people you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to increased levels of 'happy chemical' uptake," the professor continues.

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

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly pun with a Christmas cracker," she says. "You are actually performing a lot of the really vital work of making, maintaining the connections you have with those you care about."

Which Happens Inside the Mind?

But what is truly happening inside the mind when we listen to a joke?

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

Using brain scanning technology, a kind of brain scanner which shows which areas of the brain are more active, researchers have been able to chart the regions that receive more blood.

Testing entails scanning the brains of volunteer subjects and then exposing them to a database of funny words, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded chuckles.

"During the study we got a really interesting activation pattern of activation," says the professor.

A gag stimulates not just the parts of the brain responsible for auditory processing and interpreting speech, but also brain areas associated with both planning and initiating movement and those linked to vision and memory.

Combine all of this as a whole, and individuals listening to a pun have a sophisticated set of neural reactions that underpin the laughter we experience.

The Contagious Power of Chuckles

Researchers discovered that when a humorous word is combined with laughter there is a greater response in the mind than the identical phrase when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

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

It means we are not just reacting to humorous words, they are reacting to the amusement that accompanies them.

Amusement, according to the professor, can be infectious.

So what does this imply for the chuckles found around a Christmas gathering?

"You laugh harder when you are familiar with others," she says, "and you laugh more when you like them or love them."

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

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

The Search for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever find the ultimate joke?

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

In 2001, a psychologist set up a research search for the planet's most humorous joke.

More than 40,000 jokes later, with scores provided by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, he has a better understanding than most as to what succeeds and what fails.

The perfect festive cracker joke must be brief, he says.

"But they also need to be poor gags, puns that make us moan," he adds.

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

"This is because if nobody finds it funny – it's the gag's shortcoming, not yours.

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

"That's a common moment around the table and I think it's lovely."