🔗 Share this article

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

This quip is met by moans that echo through a warehouse in London.

This describes a humor-evaluation session with a company that produces products for social events. Its repertoire features festive crackers.

The firm's founder smiles, almost apologetically at the joke. But the joke has made the cut and will feature in future crackers.

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

The key to a great holiday cracker pun is not the identical as a good gag per se. It is entirely about the setting - in this case, the shared laughter of the Christmas dinner table with elders, children and potentially friends.

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

The Neuroscience Behind Communal Laughter

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

"Therefore when you are chuckling with people at the holiday table you are engaging in what's very likely a really primordial mammalian social vocalisation," says a professor.

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

Researchers have found that a lack of such interactions can seriously damage mental and physical health.

"The people you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to enhanced levels of endorphin release," the professor adds.

These natural chemicals are the body's "happy chemicals" and are released both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in response to enjoyable experiences, such as laughing with friends over a particularly awful Christmas cracker joke.

"You're not just chuckling at a foolish joke with a Christmas cracker," the expert states. "You are actually performing a lot of the really important task of making, maintaining the connections you have with the people you love."

Which Occurs Inside the Mind?

But what is truly taking place within the brain when we listen to a gag?

A tremendous amount happens in reaction to humour, it turns out.

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of brain scanner which shows which parts of the brain are more active, researchers have been able to map the areas that get more blood flow.

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

"In the scanner we observed a really interesting activation pattern of activation," says the neuroscientist.

A gag stimulates not just the parts of the brain in charge of hearing and understanding speech, but also neural regions involved in both preparation and starting movement and those linked to vision and recall.

Combine these elements together, and people listening to a joke have a sophisticated set of neural reactions that underpin the laughter we experience.

The Infectious Nature of Laughter

Scientists discovered that when a funny word is paired with chuckles there is a stronger reaction in the brain than the identical phrase when followed by a non-emotional sound.

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

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

Amusement, according to the expert, can be contagious.

So what does this imply for the laughter heard at a Christmas gathering?

"People laugh more when you are familiar with people," she says, "and you laugh more when you are fond of them or love them."

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

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

The Search for the Ideal Cracker Joke

Is it possible to find the perfect joke?

Probably not, but that has not stopped researchers from attempting to.

Years ago, a professor established a scientific search for the world's most humorous gag.

Over tens of thousands of gags later, with scores lodged by 350,000 people globally, he has a better understanding than most as to what succeeds and what fails.

The ideal Christmas cracker joke must be short, he explains.

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

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

"The reason is that if nobody laughs – it's the joke's fault, not yours.

"The fascinating part about the Christmas cracker jokes is that none of us considers them humorous.

"That's a shared moment at the gathering and I think it's lovely."