🔗 Share this article

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

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

This describes a humor-evaluation session with a company that makes products for social events. Its catalogue includes festive crackers.

The firm's founder grins, nearly apologetically at the gag. But the joke has made the cut and will feature in upcoming crackers.

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

The key to a good holiday cracker joke is not the identical as a good gag per se. It is entirely about the setting - in this case, the communal amusement of the holiday dinner table with elders, children and possibly friends.

"You want the joke to be a thing that unites the child together with the grandparent," she adds.

The Science Of Communal Laughter

Coming together to experience communal amusement is not only ancient, experts argue, it is likely to be pre-human.

"So when you are laughing with others at the Christmas table you are dropping into what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammal play sound," explains a professor.

Shared laughter, she explains, aids in make and maintain social bonds between individuals.

Researchers have found that a absence of these interactions can significantly damage mental and physical well-being.

"Those you talk to, and share laughter with, it results in increased levels of endorphin release," she adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are released both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to enjoyable activities, such as laughing with friends over a truly terrible Christmas cracker gag.

"It's not simply laughing at a silly joke with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are actually doing a lot of the truly important task of building, preserving the social bonds you have with those you love."

Which Occurs In the Brain?

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

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

Employing brain scanning technology, a kind of neural imager which indicates which parts of the brain are more active, researchers have been able to map the regions that receive more blood flow.

The research involves imaging the minds of volunteer participants and then subjecting them to a database of funny phrases, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we observed a really interesting pattern of neural activity," notes the professor.

A gag activates not just the areas of the mind in charge of hearing and interpreting speech, but also brain regions involved in both planning and initiating motion and those linked to sight and memory.

Put all of this together, and individuals listening to a joke have a sophisticated set of neural responses that support the amusement we experience.

The Contagious Nature of Chuckles

Scientists found that when a funny word is paired with chuckles there is a greater reaction in the brain than the identical phrase when accompanied by a neutral sound.

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

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

Laughter, according to the professor, can be contagious.

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

"You laugh more when you are familiar with people," she notes, "and laughter increases further when you like them or care for them."

When it comes to Christmas cracker puns, she says, the feel-good effect is more probable to be triggered not by the gag in itself, but from the response to it.

"It's the laughter. The joke is the terrible Christmas cracker pun, and it's just a reason to chuckle together."

The Quest for the Ideal Festive Pun

Will we ever find the perfect gag?

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

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

More than 40,000 gags later, with ratings lodged by 350,000 people around the world, he has a clearer idea than many as to what works and what fails.

The ideal Christmas cracker joke must be brief, he says.

"They must also need to be bad gags, jokes that cause us to groan," he adds.

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

"The reason is that if nobody laughs – it's the joke's shortcoming, not your own.

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

"That's a shared experience around the table and I think it's wonderful."