🔗 Share this article

"How much did Father Christmas's sleigh cost? Nothing, it was on the house."

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

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

The firm's owner grins, almost sheepishly at the joke. But the joke has made the cut and will feature in upcoming crackers.

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

The secret to a great Christmas cracker pun is not the same as a good gag per se. It is all about the setting - in this case, the shared amusement of the holiday meal with elders, kids and possibly neighbours.

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

The Neuroscience Behind Communal Laughter

Gathering to enjoy shared amusement is not only nothing new, experts say, it is likely to be older than humanity.

"So when you are laughing with people at the Christmas table you are engaging in what's almost certainly a really ancient mammal play vocalisation," explains a professor.

Communal laughter, she says, helps forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals.

Researchers have found that a absence of these social exchanges can significantly harm mental and physical well-being.

"The people you talk to, and share laughter with, it leads to increased amounts of endorphin release," she adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in response to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with friends over a particularly awful festive cracker joke.

"You're not just chuckling at a foolish pun with a Christmas cracker," the expert says. "You are in fact performing a lot of the truly important work of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

Which Occurs Inside the Brain?

But what is actually happening within the mind when we listen to a gag?

A tremendous amount occurs in reaction 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 areas that receive more blood.

Testing entails scanning the brains of volunteer participants and then exposing them to a collection of humorous words, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

"During the study we observed a very fascinating pattern of activation," notes the professor.

A joke activates not just the parts of the mind responsible for hearing and understanding language, but also brain regions associated with both planning and starting motion and those involved in sight and recall.

Put all of this as a whole, and people hearing a pun have a sophisticated set of brain reactions that underpin the amusement we hear.

The Contagious Power of Chuckles

Scientists found that when a humorous phrase is combined with laughter there is a greater response in the mind than the identical phrase when accompanied by a neutral sound.

"This was in areas of the brain that you would use to contort your face into a grin or a laugh," she explains.

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

Laughter, according to the expert, can be contagious.

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

"People laugh more when you know others," she says, "and laughter increases more when you are fond of them or love them."

When it comes to festive cracker jokes, she explains, the positive factor is more probable to be caused not by the gag in itself, but from the reaction to it.

"The laughter is key. The gag is the terrible Christmas cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to chuckle together."

The Search for the Perfect Cracker Joke

Will we ever discover the perfect gag?

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

In 2001, a psychologist established a research search for the planet's funniest gag.

More than tens of thousands of jokes later, with ratings provided by 350,000 participants globally, he has a better understanding than most as to what works and what fails.

The perfect festive cracker pun needs to be brief, he says.

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

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

"The reason is that if nobody finds it funny – it's the joke's shortcoming, not yours.

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

"That's a common moment around the gathering and I believe it's lovely."