"How much did Santa's sleigh cost? Nothing, it was on the house."
This joke is greeted with moans that echo through a storage facility in the capital.
This describes a humor-evaluation session with a company that makes products for social events. Its catalogue includes Christmas crackers.
The firm's owner grins, nearly apologetically at the gag. But the joke has been selected and will feature in upcoming crackers.
"You measure the joke by the number of moans and the intensity of the groans around the table," she says.
The key to a good holiday cracker joke is not the same as a stand-up gag per se. It is entirely about the context - in this instance, the shared amusement of the holiday dinner table with grandparents, children and possibly neighbours.
"The goal is for the joke to be something that brings the child together with the 80-year-old," she states.
Gathering to experience shared amusement is not only nothing new, experts argue, it is probably to be pre-human.
"Therefore when you are laughing with others around the holiday table you are engaging in what's very likely a really ancient mammalian social sound," explains a neuroscience expert.
Shared laughter, she says, aids in make and maintain social bonds between individuals.
Scientists have found that a lack of such social exchanges can seriously harm mental and physical well-being.
"The people you converse with, and laugh with, it results in enhanced levels of 'happy chemical' release," the professor adds.
Endorphins are the body's "happy chemicals" and are released both to reduce tension and discomfort and in reaction to pleasurable experiences, such as chuckling with loved ones over a particularly awful Christmas cracker joke.
"It's not simply chuckling at a foolish joke with a Christmas cracker," the expert states. "You are actually performing a lot of the really vital task of making, maintaining the social bonds you have with the people you care about."
But what is truly happening inside the mind when we listen to a gag?
A tremendous amount happens in reaction to humour, it transpires.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a kind of neural imager which shows which parts of the mind are more active, scientists have been able to map the areas that receive more blood.
Testing entails scanning the minds of healthy subjects and then subjecting them to a database of humorous phrases, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or recorded laughter.
"In the scanner we observed a very interesting activation pattern of activation," says the neuroscientist.
A gag activates not just the parts of the brain responsible for auditory processing and understanding language, but also neural regions associated with both preparation and starting movement and those linked to vision and recall.
Combine these elements together, and individuals listening to a pun have a complex series of neural responses that support the laughter we experience.
Scientists found that when a humorous word is paired with laughter there is a stronger reaction in the brain than the identical word when followed by a neutral sound.
"This was in areas of the brain that you would use to contort your face into a grin or a laugh," the professor explains.
It indicates people are not just responding to humorous words, they are reacting to the amusement that accompanies them.
Amusement, says the professor, can be contagious.
So what does this imply for the laughter heard at a Christmas table?
"People laugh more when you are familiar with others," she says, "and you laugh further when you are fond of them or care for them."
When it comes to festive cracker puns, she says, the feel-good factor is more likely to be caused not by the joke itself, but from the reaction to it.
"The laughter is key. The joke is the dreadful Christmas cracker pun, and it's just a pretext to chuckle together."
Will we ever discover the perfect gag?
Probably not, but that has not stopped experts from trying to.
In 2001, a psychologist set up a research search for the planet's funniest joke.
Over 40,000 jokes later, with scores lodged by 350,000 people around the world, he has a better idea than most as to what works and what does not.
The ideal festive cracker joke needs to be short, he says.
"But they also need to be bad gags, jokes that cause us to groan," he adds.
The more "terrible" the joke, he states the better.
"This is because if nobody finds it funny – it's the gag's shortcoming, not yours.
"What's interesting about the Christmas cracker puns is that not one person find them humorous.
"That's a shared moment around the gathering and I think it's wonderful."
A software engineer and tech writer passionate about open-source projects and AI advancements.
