Why do we sit round the festive table pulling crackers and groaning at awful puns? Alice Fisher reveals why bad jokes make for a merry Christmas

The V&A museum's archive is stored in Blythe House, Kensington. This labyrinthine Victorian building contains many national treasures, from Stone Age tools to William Morris's stained glass designs. It also holds hundreds of Christmas-cracker jokes. Tucked in vast folders, sheet after faded sheet of jokes, limericks, quotations and rhymes have been carefully preserved. If you think it's peculiar that the V&A, a museum founded to support excellence in art and design, has room for one of the tackiest Christmas trimmings, then you're underestimating the cracker. Like Morris's designs, these 150-year-old novelties have their anthropological worth. And Christmas dinner really wouldn't be the same without them. During December 2000, the British may have consumed 10m turkeys, but we pulled more than 50m crackers.

On the surface, there's a cracker for everyone: from handmade designs containing real silver jewellery to Harry Potter sets featuring Hogwarts badges and stickers. But they all have one thing in common. The joke. And not just any joke, it's a bad joke. More 'Oh no' than 'Ho ho'. You know the sort of thing: What do you call a crate of ducks? A box of quackers! What do lawyers wear to work? Law suits! Somehow, these puns have become the essence of British Christmas. It's a peculiar thing, when you think about it, that a miserable pun has become as important as the Queen's Speech and The Wizard of Oz.

To understand the origin of the crap joke, you have to understand the origin of the cracker. They were invented by British confectioner Tom Smith. On a trip to France in the 1840s, Smith admired the way our French neighbours wrapped their bonbons in nice paper. So he pinched the idea. Hastening back to his Clerkenwell shop, he started to wrap his sweets individually. And, to appeal to his largely female customer base, he added a little love motto written on a piece of paper inside each wrapper.

The treats were launched at Christmas and were such a hit that, by the next year, Smith decided to up the ante. He added a charm or trinket, wrapped the whole lot in a tube, and called them 'Christmas Bonbonnes'. They were good, they were successful, but Smith felt he could do better.

The idea for the cracker's explosive 'snap' came while he watched logs crackling in his fireplace. It took him two years to perfect it. His version was made from two toughened strips coated with saltpetre and bound with Manila paper (today's crackers use silver formulate). With charming literalness, Smith called them 'Bangs of Expectation'. And thus, the cracker was born in 1860.

They were an enormous hit. In the 1880s, over 170 different designs were in Smith's catalogue, and by the 1890s, Smith made 13m crackers a year. The company received a royal warrant in 1906, and still makes special crackers for the royal family today. They weren't known as crackers at first: they were called 'cosaques', because the snap reminded people of the sound of Cossacks' whips as they rode through Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Though quite why a bloody, foreign conflict should inspire a name for a festive novelty is unclear. Christmas has always been a difficult time.

As the cracker developed, so did the mottos. In the 19th century they were a world away from today's lumpen puns. Verse by Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Longfellow replaced the love notes. But there were also humorous rhymes and couplets, many by authors like Thomas Hood, Charles H Ross and Ernest Warren, all well known journalists, writers and poets. It's the equivalent of glancing at your Wallace & Gromit crackers this year, and discovering the jokes are by Tony Parsons and Nick Hornby.

Peter Kimpton, author of Tom Smith's Christmas Crackers, worked as marketing services manager at the company between 1986-92. 'The jokes back then reflected society,' he explains. 'They weren't too risque; they were formal, a little lovey-dovey. Tom Smith was also very good at reacting to current events.' In 1917, you could buy suffragette crackers. In 1930, a box commemorated plans to build a Channel tunnel. There were sets for spinsters, boxes commemorating the First World War (contents: naval and military headdress, iron crosses, a Kaiser moustache and shells), even crackers for Masons.

It's hard to imagine how these creative and historically relevant verses dumbed down into 'knock knock' jokes. It's even hard to find out precisely when it happened. A fire at Smith's destroyed most of the archive in 1931; bombing in the Blitz pretty much finished it off. Tom Smith Crackers is still one of the largest manufacturers in the world, but is now owned by Brite Sparks, subsidiary to multinational International Greetings. The Victorian factory where Bangs of Expectation were created has been replaced by a Welsh industrial estate. And, somewhere along the way, that creative passion seems to have got lost, too. Rachel Davies, head of Brite Sparks's design studio, seems nonplussed when asked why today's cracker jokes are so dreadful. But that's probably because Tom Smith crackers have featured the same jokes for the past 55 years: 'We've taken out the un-PC ones, we're very careful about the content, but other than that there haven't been any other changes.' So they're old as well as awful. But Davies insists that this is because bad jokes are what customers want. 'People complain if we take them out.'

It would be foolish to expect verse to appear in modern crackers - many Victorian delights have gone the way of the penny farthing: replaced by better modern inventions. But cracker mottos didn't get better, they became much worse. The V&A's archive (which is mainly post-1920) includes jokes that would have been rejected by comedians on the working-men's clubs circuit, even in the Seventies. Reading them, it's no surprise that removing un-PC gags has been the biggest recent development. The Scots and women came off worst. One very tame example: Wife: 'A letter came for you marked Very Personal.' Husband: 'What did it say?'

What the archive really shows is that, where cracker mottos were once tailor-made for particular social groups, now they're universal. And it's the same whether they're destined for Budgens or Buckingham Palace. Just ask Upper Crust Crackers. This British company is the Rolls-Royce of crackers, making handmade designs to order. Clients include Asprey and Selfridges. Jo O'Connor, who owns the firm, is very fond of her dreadful jokes. Unlike Brite Sparks and many others, Upper Crust use new gags each Christmas. The whole team work at it, collecting every joke they hear, and then each year's set of jokes is decided by an office vote. 'You end up keeping an eye open for them,' says O'Connor, 'even if it's only to glance at your lollipop stick before you throw it away.'

In the 10 years that O'Connor has owned Upper Crust, she's only had one complaint. 'John Lewis received a complaint about a joke: Why did the hedgehog cross the road? To see his flat mate. The customer said it had ruined Christmas.'

Professor Richard Wiseman knows more about bad jokes than he'd like to. He ran Laugh Lab, an international experiment into the psychology of humour, to find the world's funniest joke. Over 350,000 people from 70 countries filed gags on his website and visitors rated them. Germans were the most likely to find any joke funny; the British came fourth. So maybe we're just undiscerning. Wiseman confirms that the puns found in modern crackers are the worst jokes in the world. 'They're the lowest form of humour.'

He explains that one of the reasons they are so anodyne now is because it's offensive subjects that really make us laugh. (With Laugh Lab, they even had to take down 'blonde' jokes after complaints.) This may explain John Lewis's sole complaint. 'It's a bit precious to get upset by animal cruelty, though. There are so many of these - How do you make a cat go woof? Cover it in petrol and throw it on the fire. What do you call a monkey in a minefield? A ba-boom - but worse things happen in the world.'

He thinks the key to the success of modern cracker jokes is precisely because they're not funny. 'If the joke is good and you tell it and it doesn't get a laugh, it's your problem. If the joke's bad and it doesn't get a laugh, then it's the joke's problem. My theory is that it's a way of not embarrassing people at Christmas.' So they're not jokes at all? 'In a sense, they're just a way of binding people together. Given the diversity around your average dinner table, it would be extraordinarily difficult to come up with a joke that everyone found funny. The kids won't get it, or someone will find it offensive. Even if you did, the delivery would be difficult. Women don't tell jokes to one another, so they're not used to doing it. Blokes do, but it's done in a particular context, not around the family table, and it's quite stressful to try and deliver a funny joke, so it would be a disaster.'

It's unlikely that Tom Smith would approve of modern crackers, but it's nice to know that these puns do serve a purpose. They're not just bad jokes, they're good coping mechanisms. Earlier Christmas crackers reflected the times in a straightforward way. Pride in the Empire, support for the war, even support for the suffragettes. Crackers still reflect British society, just in more complex ways. Nowadays, we don't want to bring war or politics to the Christmas table. We're not even trying to laugh over dinner, we're just trying to get along. That's just as important. And it's a new tradition that's set to continue. Jo O'Connor of Upper Crust Crackers heard a joke that came in just too late for this year's stock. She can't wait to use it in 2006. 'What does a fish say when it swims into a concrete wall? Dam!' Watch out for it next year.

Pull the other one

After a year's research, here are 2005's best cracker jokes.Seriously ...

Why can't a bike stand up by itself?

Because it's two-tyred!

What do you get after it has been taken?

Your photograph!

How did the farmer fix his jeans?

With a cabbage patch!

Why was the butcher worried?

His job was at steak!

What did the bald man say when he got a comb for Christmas?

Thanks, I'll never part with it!

What's the best thing to eat in the bath?

Sponge cake!

What do you call medicine for horses?

Cough Stirrup!

What do you get if you cross Santa with a gardener?

Someone who likes to hoe, hoe, hoe!

Why did the burglar take a shower?

He wanted to make a clean getaway!

How did Noah see the animals in the Ark at night?

By flood lighting!

What did one keyboard say to the other keyboard?

Sorry, you're not my type!

Doctor, doctor, my husband thinks he's a parachutist.

Tell him to drop in and see me!

Why did the carpenter go to the doctor?

He had a saw hand!

What eight-letter word has one letter in it?

Envelope!

How did the football pitch end up as a triangle?

Somebody took a corner!

What are the small rivers that run into the Nile?

The juveniles!

Doctor, doctor, I've swallowed a quilt.

I thought you looked a bit down in the mouth!

Name three famous poles.

North, South & tad!

How many chimneys does Santa go down?

Stacks!

Where do cows go on a Saturday night?

To the moo-vies!

Why is Prancer always wet?

Because he's a rain-deer!

What runs but never walks?

Water!

What do you get if you cross a tin opener, a vampire and a cricket team?

An opening bat!

· Jokes courtesy of Upper Crust Crackers