The Impact of Holiday Cracker Puns Do to The Brain?

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

This one-liner is greeted with moans that resonate through a storage facility in the capital.

This describes a humor-evaluation session with a firm that produces supplies for gatherings. Its catalogue includes festive crackers.

The company's founder grins, nearly apologetically at the joke. But the joke has been selected and will appear in upcoming crackers.

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

The key to a good holiday cracker pun is not the identical as a stand-up joke in itself. It is all about the setting - in this instance, the shared amusement of the Christmas dinner table with grandparents, children and potentially friends.

"You want the gag to be something that unites the eight-year-old together with the 80-year-old," she adds.

The Neuroscience Of Shared Amusement

Gathering to enjoy shared laughter is not only nothing new, scientists say, it is likely to be pre-human.

"So when you are laughing with others around the Christmas table you are engaging in what's almost certainly a truly primordial mammalian play vocalisation," says a neuroscience expert.

Shared laughter, she explains, helps forge and strengthen social bonds between individuals.

Researchers have found that a absence of such social exchanges can significantly harm both psychological and bodily health.

"The people you talk to, and share laughter with, it results in enhanced amounts of 'happy chemical' uptake," she adds.

Endorphins are the brain's "feel-good compounds" and are produced both to reduce tension and discomfort and in response to pleasurable activities, such as chuckling with loved ones over a truly terrible festive cracker joke.

"It's not simply chuckling at a silly joke with a Christmas cracker," she says. "You are in fact doing a lot of the truly important task of building, preserving the connections you have with those you love."

What Occurs Inside the Mind?

But what is truly happening within the brain when we listen to a joke?

A tremendous amount occurs 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, researchers have been able to chart the regions that get more blood.

Testing entails scanning the minds of volunteer subjects and then exposing them to a database of funny phrases, paired with either a non-emotional sound, or pre-recorded laughter.

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

A gag activates not just the areas of the brain in charge of hearing and interpreting language, but also neural regions involved in both preparation and initiating movement and those involved in sight and memory.

Put all of this as a whole, and people hearing a pun have a complex set of brain responses that support the laughter we experience.

The Contagious Power 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 accompanied by a non-emotional sound.

"This was in parts of the brain that you would employ to contort your face into a grin or a chuckle," the professor explains.

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

Laughter, according to the professor, can be infectious.

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

"People laugh more when you are familiar with people," she says, "and laughter increases further when you like them or care for them."

When it comes to Christmas cracker puns, she says, the positive effect is more likely to be caused not by the joke in itself, but from the reaction to it.

"It's the laughter. The joke is the dreadful holiday cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to laugh as a group."

The Quest for the Perfect Festive Pun

Will we ever find the ultimate gag?

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

Years ago, a professor set up a research search for the planet's most humorous gag.

More than tens of thousands of gags later, with scores lodged by hundreds of thousands of participants around the world, he has a better understanding than many as to what works and what fails.

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

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

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

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

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

"It creates a shared experience around the table and I think it's lovely."