🔗 Share this article

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

This quip is greeted with moans that resonate through a storage facility in London.

This describes a humor-evaluation meeting with a company that makes supplies for gatherings. Its repertoire includes festive crackers.

The firm's owner smiles, almost sheepishly at the gag. But the pun has been selected and will feature in future crackers.

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

The key to a good holiday cracker pun is not the same as a good joke per se. It is all about the setting - in this case, the shared laughter of the holiday dinner table with grandparents, kids and potentially neighbours.

"The goal is for the gag to be a thing that unites the eight-year-old in harmony with the grandparent," she states.

The Neuroscience Of Communal Amusement

Gathering to enjoy communal amusement is not only ancient, experts say, it is probably to be older than humanity.

"So when you are laughing with people around the Christmas table you are dropping into what's very likely a truly ancient mammal play sound," explains a professor.

Shared laughter, she says, aids in forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals.

Scientists have discovered that a lack of these interactions can seriously damage both psychological and bodily health.

"The people you converse with, and share laughter with, it results in increased levels of 'happy chemical' release," the professor adds.

These natural chemicals are the body's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with loved ones over a particularly terrible festive cracker gag.

"You're not just laughing at a foolish pun with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are actually performing a lot of the truly vital work of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with those you care about."

Which Happens In the Brain?

But what is actually happening inside the brain when we listen to a gag?

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

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of brain scanner which shows which areas of the mind are more active, scientists have been able to chart the areas that get more blood flow.

Testing involves scanning the brains of volunteer subjects and then exposing them to a collection of humorous words, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we got a very fascinating activation pattern of activation," says the neuroscientist.

A joke activates not just the parts of the brain in charge of auditory processing and understanding speech, but also neural areas involved in both planning and starting motion and those linked to vision and memory.

Combine these elements as a whole, and individuals hearing a pun have a complex series of brain reactions that support the laughter we hear.

The Contagious Nature of Chuckles

Scientists found that when a funny phrase is combined with laughter there is a stronger response in the brain than the identical phrase when followed by a neutral sound.

"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would employ to contort your expression into a smile or a laugh," the professor says.

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

Laughter, according to the expert, can be contagious.

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

"People laugh harder when you know others," she notes, "and laughter increases further when you are fond of them or care for them."

When it comes to Christmas cracker puns, she says, the feel-good factor is more probable to be caused not by the joke itself, but from the reaction to it.

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

The Quest for the Ideal Festive Pun

Is it possible to discover the perfect gag?

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

Years ago, a psychologist established a research search for the world's most humorous gag.

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

The ideal festive cracker pun needs to be brief, he explains.

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

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

"This is because if nobody finds it funny – 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.

"That's a common experience at the table and I think it's lovely."