What do Christmas cracker jokes do to our brains?

Christmas cracker jokes are more about eliciting groans and shared laughter than being genuinely funny, according to experts at a joke-testing session in London. The process of enjoying these jokes around a dinner table helps forge and maintain social connections, releasing "happy chemicals" like endorphins that boost well-being. Research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that hearing jokes and laughter triggers a complex neural response in the brain, indicating that the joy from these jokes comes more from the collective laughter than the jokes themselves.