🔗 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 resonate through a warehouse in London.

This describes a humor-evaluation session with a firm that makes supplies for social events. Its catalogue includes Christmas crackers.

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

"The success is gauged by the gag by the volume of groans and the loudness of the groans around the table," the founder says.

The key to a good Christmas cracker pun is not the same as a good gag per se. It is all about the setting - in this instance, the communal amusement of the Christmas meal with grandparents, children and potentially neighbours.

"You want the gag to be a thing that brings the eight-year-old together with the 80-year-old," she adds.

The Neuroscience Of Communal Laughter

Gathering to experience shared laughter is not only nothing new, experts argue, it is probably to be older than humanity.

"So when you are chuckling with people at the Christmas dinner you are dropping into what's very likely a really primordial mammalian play vocalisation," explains a neuroscience expert.

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

Scientists have found that a absence of such interactions can seriously damage both psychological and bodily well-being.

"Those you converse with, and share laughter with, it leads to increased amounts of 'happy chemical' release," the professor continues.

These natural chemicals are the body's "happy chemicals" and are released both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to enjoyable experiences, such as laughing with friends over a truly awful Christmas cracker gag.

"It's not simply chuckling at a foolish joke with a Christmas cracker," she says. "You are actually doing a lot of the really important work of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you care about."

What Occurs In the Brain?

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

A tremendous amount occurs in response to comedy, it transpires.

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a type of brain scanner which indicates which areas of the brain are working harder, scientists have been able to map the areas that get more blood.

The research involves scanning the brains of volunteer participants and then exposing them to a collection of humorous phrases, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

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

A gag stimulates not just the parts of the mind in charge of auditory processing and interpreting language, but also neural regions involved in both preparation and initiating motion and those linked to vision and memory.

Put these elements as a whole, and people listening to a pun have a complex series of neural responses that support the amusement we experience.

The Contagious Nature of Laughter

Scientists found that when a humorous phrase is paired with chuckles there is a greater response in the mind than the identical word when followed by a neutral sound.

"This was in areas of the brain that you would use to contort your expression into a smile or a chuckle," the professor says.

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

Laughter, says the professor, can be contagious.

So what does this imply for the laughter heard around a holiday gathering?

"People laugh more when you know people," she notes, "and laughter increases further when you are fond of them or love them."

When it comes to Christmas cracker puns, she explains, the feel-good factor is more likely to be caused not by the gag in itself, but from the response to it.

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

The Quest for the Ideal Festive Pun

Will we ever find the perfect joke?

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

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

Over tens of thousands of gags later, with ratings lodged by hundreds of thousands of participants globally, he has a better idea than many as to what succeeds and what does not.

The ideal festive cracker joke must be short, he says.

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

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

"This is because if nobody finds it funny – it's the gag's fault, not your own.

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

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