The Impact of Holiday Cracker Puns Affect Our Brains?

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

This joke is greeted with moans that echo through a storage facility in London.

We're at a humor-evaluation session with a firm that makes supplies for gatherings. Its catalogue includes festive crackers.

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

"You measure the joke by the volume of groans and the intensity of the groans at the table," the founder says.

The secret to a good Christmas cracker pun is not the identical as a stand-up gag in itself. It is all about the context - in this instance, the communal amusement of the Christmas meal with grandparents, kids and possibly neighbours.

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

The Neuroscience Of Shared Amusement

Coming together to experience shared laughter is not only nothing new, scientists say, it is probably to be older than humanity.

"Therefore when you are laughing with others around the holiday table you are dropping into what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammalian social sound," says a neuroscience expert.

Shared amusement, she says, helps make and maintain social bonds between individuals.

Scientists have discovered that a absence of these social exchanges can seriously damage mental and physical well-being.

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

Endorphins are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are produced both to alleviate tension and discomfort and in reaction to pleasurable experiences, such as laughing with loved ones over a truly awful festive cracker gag.

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly pun with a Christmas cracker," she states. "You are actually doing a lot of the truly important task of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with those you care about."

Which Occurs Inside the Mind?

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

An awful lot occurs in reaction to humour, it transpires.

Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of neural imager which indicates which areas of the mind are more active, researchers have been able to map the regions that get more blood flow.

The research involves scanning the minds of healthy participants and then subjecting them to a collection of funny words, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

"In the scanner we observed a very interesting pattern of neural activity," says the neuroscientist.

A gag stimulates not just the parts of the mind in charge of hearing and interpreting speech, but also neural regions associated with both preparation and starting motion and those linked to vision and memory.

Combine these elements together, and individuals listening to a joke have a sophisticated set of neural reactions that underpin the amusement we hear.

The Infectious Power of Chuckles

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

"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would employ to move your expression into a grin or a chuckle," she explains.

It means people are not just responding to humorous jokes, they are responding to the amusement that accompanies them.

Amusement, according to the expert, can be contagious.

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

"People laugh more when you are familiar with others," she notes, "and you laugh more when you like them or care for them."

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

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

The Quest for the Ideal Festive Pun

Is it possible to discover the perfect gag?

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

In 2001, a psychologist established a scientific project for the world's most humorous joke.

Over tens of thousands of jokes submitted, with ratings lodged by hundreds of thousands of people around the world, he has a better idea than many as to what succeeds and what does not.

The perfect festive cracker joke needs to be brief, he explains.

"They must also need to be bad gags, puns that make us moan," he adds.

The more "terrible" the gag, he says the more effective.

"This is because if no-one laughs – it's the gag's fault, not yours.

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

"It creates a common experience around the gathering and I think it's wonderful."