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In a warehouse in Lambeth, London, a group of employees gather for a session dedicated to selecting jokes for Christmas crackers, a festive tradition. Among them is Clare Harris, founder and CEO of Talking Tables, a company specializing in party supplies including these crackers. As a joke about Santa’s sleigh costing “nothing, it was on the house” prompts predictable groans, Harris explains that the success of a Christmas cracker joke isn’t about how funny it is but about the collective reaction it sparks around the dinner table. “You measure the joke by the number of groans and the loudness of the groans around the table,” she says, emphasizing that the aim is to unite all generations from children to grandparents through shared amusement.
The process of joke testing is methodical and forward-looking. The team works on material well in advance; the jokes they review now will be featured in crackers two years from now. Each joke is pitched and debated, with some earning enthusiastic groans and others firmly rejected. For instance, a joke about monkeys singing “jungle bells” did not fare well and was discarded. The company draws on a diverse pool of sources for their jokes, including the internet, word-of-mouth, and their own collections. Despite the rise of artificial intelligence, Clare Harris firmly states that they have not turned to AI for crafting jokes. Instead, the focus remains on what elicits the strongest emotional response during these sessions, asking, “Does it do what we want around the Christmas table?”
Experts say that the laughter sparked by cracker jokes serves a crucial social function, that goes beyond simple amusement. Professor Sophie Scott, director of University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, explains that shared laughter, such as the kind heard at Christmas dinners, taps into ancient mammalian vocalizations linked to play and social bonding. “You are dropping into what’s almost certainly a really ancient mammal play vocalisation,” she says. Laughing together strengthens relationships and releases endorphins—natural chemicals in the brain responsible for feelings of happiness and stress relief. According to Prof Scott, the act of laughing at a “silly joke” like one found in a cracker is part of what helps maintain the connections we have with our loved ones.
Neuroscientific research reveals that reacting to humor involves a complex interplay of brain regions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Prof Scott and her team have studied the brain activity of individuals listening to jokes paired with laughter. They found that many brain areas activate, including those associated with hearing, memory, vision, and preparing the body to laugh. Laughter itself proves to be contagious, as people respond not only to the joke but also to the laughter accompanying it. “You laugh more when you know people,” Prof Scott notes, “and you laugh more when you like them or love them.” Consequently, the “feel-good” atmosphere at Christmas tables owes more to the shared laughter than the jokes themselves, turning even the worst of cracker jokes into a valued tradition of communal joy
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