"What was the price did Santa's sleigh cost? Zero, it was on the house."
This quip is greeted with moans that echo through a warehouse in the capital.
We're at a joke-testing session with a firm that makes products for social events. Its repertoire includes festive crackers.
The firm's owner smiles, almost apologetically at the gag. But the joke has been selected and will feature in upcoming crackers.
"The success is gauged by the gag by the number of moans and the intensity of the groans around the table," the founder explains.
The secret to a great Christmas cracker pun is not the same as a stand-up joke in itself. It is all about the context - in this instance, the communal laughter of the holiday dinner table with elders, kids and potentially friends.
"The goal is for the joke to be a thing that unites the eight-year-old in harmony with the grandparent," she adds.
Gathering to experience shared laughter is not only nothing new, experts say, it is probably to be older than humanity.
"So when you are laughing with others at the Christmas dinner you are dropping into what's very likely a truly ancient mammal play vocalisation," says a professor.
Communal laughter, she explains, aids in make and maintain social bonds between people.
Scientists have discovered that a lack of such interactions can significantly damage mental and physical health.
"Those you converse with, and laugh with, it leads to increased amounts of 'happy chemical' uptake," she continues.
These natural chemicals are the brain's "happy chemicals" and are released both to alleviate stress and pain and in response to pleasurable activities, such as chuckling with friends over a particularly awful festive cracker joke.
"It's not simply chuckling at a silly joke with a holiday cracker," she states. "You are in fact performing a lot of the really vital task of making, maintaining the connections you have with the people you care about."
But what is actually taking place inside the mind when we hear a gag?
A tremendous amount happens in reaction to comedy, it turns out.
Employing brain scanning technology, a kind of neural imager which indicates which parts of the mind are more active, scientists have been able to map the regions that get more blood.
Testing entails imaging the minds of healthy participants and then subjecting them to a database of humorous words, accompanied by either a non-emotional sound, or recorded chuckles.
"During the study we observed a really interesting pattern of activation," says the professor.
A joke stimulates not just the areas of the brain in charge of auditory processing and interpreting language, but also brain regions associated with both planning and initiating motion and those linked to sight and recall.
Put all of this together, and individuals hearing a joke have a sophisticated series of neural responses that underpin the laughter we experience.
Researchers discovered that when a humorous phrase is combined with laughter there is a greater response in the brain than the identical phrase when accompanied by a non-emotional sound.
"This activation occurred in areas of the brain that you would use to contort your expression into a smile or a laugh," the professor says.
It indicates people are not just responding to humorous words, they are reacting to the amusement that follows them.
Amusement, according to the expert, can be infectious.
So what does this mean for the laughter heard at a holiday gathering?
"People laugh harder when you are familiar with others," she notes, "and you laugh more when you like them or care for them."
When it comes to festive cracker puns, she says, the feel-good factor is more likely to be triggered not by the joke itself, but from the reaction to it.
"It's the laughter. The joke is the terrible Christmas cracker joke, and it's just a pretext to laugh together."
Is it possible to find the ultimate gag?
Likely not, but that has not prevented experts from attempting to.
Years ago, a professor set up a research search for the world's most humorous joke.
Over 40,000 gags later, with scores lodged by 350,000 participants around the world, he has a clearer idea than many as to what works and what fails.
The perfect festive cracker joke needs to be brief, he says.
"But they also be poor jokes, jokes that make us groan," he continues.
The more "awful" the joke, he says the better.
"The reason is that if nobody finds it funny – it's the joke's fault, not your own.
"The fascinating part about the Christmas cracker jokes is that none of us considers them funny.
"That's a shared experience around the gathering and I think it's lovely."
A tech enthusiast and gaming aficionado with over a decade of experience in digital media and content creation.
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