🔗 Share this article

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

This one-liner is greeted with groans that resonate through a storage facility in London.

This describes a joke-testing meeting with a firm that makes products for gatherings. Its catalogue includes festive crackers.

The company's owner smiles, almost apologetically at the joke. But the joke has been selected and will appear in upcoming crackers.

"The success is gauged by the joke by the number of groans and the loudness of the groans at the table," she explains.

The secret to a good Christmas cracker joke is not the identical as a stand-up joke per se. It is all about the setting - in this instance, the communal laughter of the Christmas dinner table with grandparents, kids and possibly friends.

"The goal is for the gag to be something that brings the eight-year-old together with the grandparent," she adds.

The Neuroscience Behind Shared Amusement

Gathering to enjoy shared laughter is not only nothing new, scientists say, it is likely to be pre-human.

"So when you are laughing with people around the Christmas table you are engaging in what's almost certainly a really ancient mammalian play sound," says a professor.

Shared laughter, she says, aids in make and maintain social connections between individuals.

Scientists have discovered that a lack of such interactions can significantly harm both psychological and bodily health.

"Those you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to increased levels of endorphin release," the professor adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are produced both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to enjoyable experiences, such as chuckling with friends over a truly awful Christmas cracker joke.

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly joke with a Christmas cracker," the expert states. "You are in fact performing a lot of the truly important task of building, preserving the social bonds you have with those you care about."

What Happens Inside the Mind?

But what is actually taking place inside the brain when we listen to a joke?

An awful lot occurs in reaction to comedy, it turns out.

Using brain scanning technology, a kind of brain scanner which indicates which areas of the mind are more active, researchers have been able to map the regions that get more blood flow.

The research involves scanning the minds of volunteer subjects and then subjecting them to a collection of funny words, paired with 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 areas of the brain responsible for hearing and understanding speech, but also neural areas involved in both planning and initiating movement and those linked to vision and recall.

Put these elements together, and people listening to a joke have a complex series of brain reactions that support the amusement we hear.

The Contagious Nature of Laughter

Researchers found that when a humorous word is combined with chuckles there is a greater response in the brain than the same word when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

"This was in areas of the mind that you would employ to move your expression into a grin or a laugh," she says.

It indicates we are not just reacting to humorous jokes, they are responding to the laughter that accompanies them.

Amusement, says the expert, can be contagious.

So what does this mean for the laughter found around a holiday table?

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

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she says, the positive factor is more likely to be caused not by the gag 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 together."

The Quest for the Ideal Festive Pun

Is it possible to discover the ultimate gag?

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

Years ago, a professor set up a research project for the planet's most humorous gag.

Over 40,000 gags submitted, with scores provided by hundreds of thousands of people globally, he has a clearer idea than many as to what works and what fails.

The perfect Christmas cracker pun must be brief, he says.

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

The increasingly "awful" the joke, he states the better.

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

"What's interesting about the Christmas cracker puns is that not one person considers them funny.

"It creates a common experience at the table and I believe it's lovely."