🔗 Share this article

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

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

We're at a humor-evaluation session with a firm that produces products for social events. Its repertoire features Christmas crackers.

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

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

The secret to a great holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a stand-up gag in itself. It is entirely about the context - in this instance, the communal laughter of the holiday meal with elders, kids and possibly friends.

"The goal is for the gag to be a thing that brings the child together with the 80-year-old," she adds.

The Science Behind Shared Amusement

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

"Therefore when you are chuckling with people at the holiday table you are engaging in what's very likely a truly primordial mammal social vocalisation," explains a professor.

Communal laughter, she says, aids in make and maintain social bonds between people.

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

"Those you converse with, and laugh with, it results in increased levels of 'happy chemical' release," the professor continues.

These natural chemicals are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to reduce tension and discomfort and in reaction to enjoyable activities, such as chuckling with friends over a truly terrible festive cracker gag.

"It's not simply laughing at a silly joke with a Christmas cracker," the expert says. "You are in fact performing a lot of the truly important task of building, preserving the connections you have with the people you care about."

Which Occurs In the Brain?

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

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

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

Testing entails scanning the brains of healthy subjects and then subjecting them to a collection of humorous phrases, paired with either a neutral sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we got a very fascinating activation pattern of neural activity," notes the professor.

A joke activates not just the areas of the brain in charge of auditory processing and interpreting language, but also brain regions involved in both preparation and starting motion and those linked to sight and recall.

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

The Contagious Power of Chuckles

Researchers discovered that when a funny phrase is combined with laughter there is a greater response in the brain than the identical phrase when followed by a non-emotional sound.

"This was in areas of the mind that you would use to contort your expression into a smile or a chuckle," she says.

It indicates people are not just reacting to humorous words, they are responding to the amusement that follows them.

Laughter, according to the professor, can be infectious.

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

"People laugh more when you are familiar with others," she notes, "and laughter increases more when you like them or love them."

When it comes to festive cracker puns, she says, the positive effect is more probable to be caused not by the gag itself, but from the response to it.

"It's the laughter. The gag is the dreadful Christmas cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to laugh as a group."

The Quest for the Perfect Cracker Joke

Will we ever find the ultimate gag?

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

In 2001, a psychologist established a scientific project for the planet's funniest joke.

More than 40,000 jokes submitted, with scores provided by 350,000 people around the world, he has a better understanding than many as to what works and what fails.

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

"But they also need to be poor jokes, jokes that cause us to moan," he continues.

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

"This is because if nobody laughs – it's the joke's shortcoming, not your own.

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

"That's a common experience at the table and I believe it's wonderful."