The Impact of Holiday Cracker Jokes Influence Our Brains?

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

This quip is greeted with moans that resonate through a warehouse in the capital.

We're at a humor-evaluation session with a company that makes supplies for gatherings. Its catalogue features festive crackers.

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

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

The secret to a good Christmas cracker joke is not the identical as a good joke per se. It is all about the context - in this instance, the communal amusement of the Christmas dinner table with elders, kids and potentially friends.

"You want the joke to be something that brings the eight-year-old in harmony with the grandparent," she adds.

The Science Of Communal Amusement

Coming together to experience communal amusement is not only nothing new, experts say, it is probably to be pre-human.

"Therefore when you are laughing with people around the holiday table you are engaging in what's very likely a really primordial mammal play vocalisation," says a neuroscience expert.

Communal amusement, she explains, helps forge and strengthen social connections between people.

Scientists have found that a absence of such social exchanges can seriously damage both psychological and bodily health.

"The people you converse with, and laugh with, it results in increased amounts of 'happy chemical' uptake," the professor continues.

These natural chemicals are the body's "feel-good compounds" and are released both to reduce stress and pain and in response to pleasurable activities, such as laughing with friends over a truly terrible Christmas cracker joke.

"You're not just chuckling at a silly pun with a holiday cracker," the expert says. "You are actually performing a lot of the really vital task of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with those you love."

What Happens Inside the Brain?

But what is truly taking place within the brain when we hear a joke?

An awful lot happens in response to humour, it transpires.

Employing brain scanning technology, a type of neural imager which shows which parts of the mind are more active, scientists have been able to map the regions that get more blood flow.

Testing entails imaging the minds of healthy participants and then subjecting them to a collection of funny phrases, accompanied by either a neutral sound, or pre-recorded chuckles.

"During the study we got a very fascinating pattern of activation," notes the neuroscientist.

A gag activates not just the parts of the mind responsible for auditory processing and understanding speech, but also brain regions associated with both preparation and initiating movement and those involved in vision and recall.

Combine all of this as a whole, and individuals listening to a joke have a complex set of neural responses that support the laughter we hear.

The Contagious Nature of Chuckles

Scientists discovered that when a funny word is combined with chuckles there is a greater response in the brain than the same word when followed by a non-emotional sound.

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

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

Amusement, according to the professor, can be infectious.

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

"You laugh more when you know people," she says, "and laughter increases more when you like them or care for them."

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she says, the feel-good effect is more probable to be triggered not by the joke itself, but from the response to it.

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

The Search for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever discover the perfect joke?

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

Years ago, a psychologist set up a research project for the world's most humorous joke.

More than tens of thousands of gags later, with scores provided by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, he has a clearer idea than many as to what works and what does not.

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

"They must also need to be poor jokes, jokes that cause us to moan," he continues.

The increasingly "terrible" the gag, he states the better.

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

"The fascinating part about the holiday cracker puns is that none of us find them funny.

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