The laughter coming from the front room was glottal, raucous and uncontrollable, writes mum-of-three Ellen Widdup.

It was the type of laughter that makes you chuckle yourself, keen to get in on the joke.

You have to stop what you are doing immediately and ask: “What is it? What are you laughing about?”

My two older children were on the floor, holding their stomachs. If they were not red in the face and sporting wide grins I’d think they were in pain.

I asked again: “What’s so funny?”

My daughter attempted to get to her feet before my son set her off again. I waited for about five minutes for the pair of them to calm down.

After a deep breath they pointed at the television – which was showing the news channel – and began to explain, through more giggles, about a man who had a rude-sounding name.

I was disappointed, to say the least – I was hoping for the greatest joke ever told.

A story I could take with me to dinner parties and woo an enraptured crowd. A fantastic tale that could bring people together. Maybe even something I could share with the readers of my column.

Humour has always been a sticking point in my house. And the problem is usually with my husband or my daughter. Whereas I would roar with laughter at Absolutely Fabulous and Outnumbered, his taste fluctuates from the bizarre (have you experienced A League of Gentlemen?) to the subtle (Annie Hall might be considered a classic but I failed to spot even one joke).

He is not afraid to offend, either, and has a history of making me squirm at formal occasions with his awful jokes and un-PC quips.

This is something my daughter is all too aware of. She now guides visiting friends away from her father in fear of another embarrassing gag.

They say a family that laughs together stays together. So it is lucky that my husband and I share a delight in schadenfreude – or laughing at other people’s misfortune.

We often settle down to watch home movie blooper show You’ve Been Framed and howl the whole way through.

My daughter cannot understand it. In fact, she has always hated the programme – even as a small child she could not understand why we were laughing at people falling off bikes, tumbling from roofs and collapsing on their wedding day.

She has even been known to cry in sympathy for the granny who trips into the paddling pool or the cat that topples the Christmas tree.

Now she is older, she removes herself from the situation by barricading her bedroom door and plugging in earphones to block out the wails of hilarity emanating from downstairs.

So why do I otherwise laugh at one thing and my husband and daughter another?

Science has the answer, as always. A researcher on a recent Stanford study said: “Our analysis showed extroversion to positively correlate with humor-drive blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in discrete regions of the right orbital frontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and bilateral temporal cortices …”

It seems the American writer EB White was right when he said analysing humour is similar to dissecting a frog – the only difference being that one kills the frog, the other kills the funny. How can we be so different? Surely if something is funny, everyone should laugh?

Well – aside from the overly-complex scientific explanations – it seems no-one is really sure.

Nature, nurture and any number of other elements apparently apply to create our humour DNA.

Hopefully you can learn humour as you grow – it would be sad if my daughter can never even raise a chuckle at someone tripping over.

When she does attempt to tell a joke, it usually involves immature toilet humour.

I fear, though, that the famous Bob Monkhouse gag may apply to my firstborn: “When I told people I wanted to be a comedian they laughed – They’re not laughing now.”

But yesterday it became clear that it was not my daughter who was the comedic outcast – it was me.

My husband often offers to feed the baby – the payoff being that he can do it in front of the television and enjoy 30 minutes of peace and quiet while the little one glugs away on his milk.

It was during one such session that, again, I heard riotous merriment from the front room.

I’d heard my husband chortling at some US comedy news programme, but surely the children were not sharing in that.

I came downstairs to investigate. They were.

“What is it?” I asked the kids, who were snorting in delight.

My daughter pointed at the television, where US presidential hopeful Donald Trump was spouting something that required him to point ferociously out at a crowd of baying Americans.

I was confused: “Why, wig aside, is Donald xTrump so funny?”

As soon as I uttered the word “Trump” the laughter levels grew again and my son muttered a surrender: “Please stop, mummy – it is hurting my belly.”

After they had calmed down I got to the bottom – ahem – of the hysterics.

“His name means fart,” said my daughter. “He is Mr Fart.”

Donald Trump seems to inspire fear and hope in equal measures across the pond – but in my house, whether he becomes the next Leader of the Free World or an also-ran, he will always be Mr Fart.

@EllenWiddup