Why the emergence of the funny magician as a ubiquitous (to say nothing of commercially-successful) contemporary archetype? From stars like Penn and Teller to the guy who does tricks at your local chain restaurant on Wednesday nights, the marriage of comedy and magic is more than good entertainment -- it's an expression of the very principles that Miller has identified. For it is in his calculated, controlled undermining of the Ritual's spell, while he continues to carry us along with it, that we recognize the breathtaking brilliance of the skilled comedic magician. No matter how adept his legerdemain or how expert his delivery of a one-liner, the magician-comedian's most skillful feat of all is to invite the audience to break with the total immersion. He encourages them not to take the tuxedo too seriously, whether it be his own or the garb of his forebears. (In his successful bid to have it both ways, he takes care to wear the tuxedo -- and then demystify it -- rather than simply appearing in casual attire.) At every turn, he reminds the crowd that the show is a "highly contrived performance" that is yet "loaded with cosmic possibility." He reveals his pageant to be what Miller calls a mechanical puppet show, but lo and behold, the magician-comedian remains the puppet master, pulling the strings of his spectators by encouraging them to get the giggles. Why is this so important and masterful an accomplishment? Miller notes that "the demand Ritual makes on us to suspend disbelief is at times no easy task," and the urge to get the giggles is testament to that fact. "Part of the way Ritual achieves a feeling of sacred separation from the commonplace is by not letting you forget that the whole thing is staged and then asking you simultaneously to forget you know that it is staged so that you can be transported by it." When we reflect on the tension between the sense of immersion and the sense of unreality, some of the unique properties of the Ritualized experience are thrown into focus. Like an absorbing fantasy novel or a lucid dream, an effective Ritual makes the subject at once a skeptical outsider and a fully-involved participant. Moreover, Miller claims that "There is much comic possibility in the contrasting visions." 0 Through his individual style of patter, every magician-comedian admits, whether explicitly or by implication, that his act is just a bunch of hocus-pocus. And yet, as his audience giggles complicitly and aloofly on cue, he forces them to suspend their disbelief by manipulating their very laughter. Perhaps some of the funny magician's jokes are just throwaways, designed more to buy time and earn audience appreciation than to cagily lampoon his art. But, even here, any successful attempt to "involve" the audience by engaging them with humor ultimately serves the purpose of the Ritual. And in the hands of a masterful trickster, the amused chuckles of a comedy- magic show's audience and the nervous titters of a Ritual's assembled can flow back and forth as swiftly as the dice he pours from tumbler to tumbler. Manipulation of the giggles is also intrinsic to the inspired artistry behind another contemporary trend -- the "bizarre" magic genre. The shocking bloody finger chops, gross-out illusions, or occult-inspired perfor 0 Ibid.