Have you ever wanted to start your own country? Well guess what, you can! On this episode of The Internet According To Jen, Jen O'Donnell talks with Carolyn Yagjian, the Grand Marshall of The Ambulatory Free States of Obsidia, a Micronation where women are in charge.


Why do you we laugh? What makes us laugh? Why don’t men on the Internet think I’m funny? To find out I talked to Dr. Peter McGraw, a professor at CU Boulder who started the country’s only Humor Research Lab, also known as, HURL.

According to the Washington Post, "Lurlene McDaniel has made a career out of making people cry." And as Bustle put it, "Sorry, John Green, but Lurlene McDaniel has been making us cry for decades." I get to chat with my favorite childhood author of sad books and she breaks my heart one last time.


I tracked down and interviewed the co-founder of "Christian and Scott's Interactive Top Ten List," which was the place where some of the first jokes on the web were published. Started by two Stanford students in their dorm room in 1995, it ran topical lists like, "Top Ten Theories Explaining The Plausibility Of Toe Rings," and "Top Ten Benefits Of the Y2K Bug." They published 20,000 jokes over the course of 20 years. And luckily for all of us the page is still archived in its original from. http://www.csittl.com/

Christian even helped me search for the jokes I wrote as a 14 year old....