Everyone Hates Mimes

"You have the right to keep remaining silent."

"Until I came here to America, I'd never realized that you were right: nobody in the world likes mimes."

— David Bowie's 60th Birthday Message to John Peel ^note  See Real Life folder below for explanation

Mimes are sometimes hated in fiction. No real reason is ever given, but the Uncanny Valley may have something to do with it - after all, their pure white faces and refusal to speak give them a definite alien aura. This trope isn't limited to people who hate mimes, but also works of fiction that seem to have it out for them. In other words a character doesn't have to say "I hate mimes" for it to be this trope. All the character needs to do is fall on, punch, kick, or otherwise cause intentional or accidental harm to a mime. A variation of this is Everyone Hates Morris Dancers, without a reason for it ever being given.

Compare Enemy Mime, Monster Clown, and Dreaded Kids' Party Entertainer Job.

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Examples:

Advertising

• The TBS commercial: "Which is funnier, a mime pretending to be trapped in a glass box (the standard "Oh, my, there's an invisible wall here!" schtick), or a mime really trapped in a glass box?" (A mime screaming for help while hammering on the glass walls of a transparent cube)
• A Starburst commercial about contradictions, which features an Irish-Asian musing about this while watching a mime...who's shouting at people.

Comic Books

• Batman: Mime◊ from◊ Batman: Enemy Mime turned to a criminal lifestyle when she and her mime troop had to disband since they weren't making any money despite critical success. Jason is not pleased by their latest villain's shtick, though Bruce gets a laugh out of Jay's revulsion;
  Jason: Mime! Yucch! That's the worst thing there is!
  Bruce: There are those who might agree with you—and others who wouldn't.
• The Chronicles of Wormwood: At one point Danny, Jay and Jimmy take a road trip to Hell, where they find that the road to it is paved with mimes rather than good intentions.
• Duckman: A story in the original underground comic had Duckman going after a criminal called the Mime Murderer, with the punchline being that Duckman intended to thank the scoundrel for killing all the mimes.
• Emilka Sza: Poor Emilka Sza has to deal with this on regular baises being literally born a mime. Maja, the books antagonist/antiheroine arc is about her overcoming her hate of mimes, which is treated as a serious prejudice.
• Futurama: In issue 41 of the comic book, Zapp Brannigan is appalled that he has been duped into training Child Soldiers. Among his list of groups of people he is willing to train for getting killed in battle, he includes mimes.
• Scooby-Doo! Team-Up: When Angel and Sam hear screams, one of Sam's guesses is that "the audience realized they were watching mimes".
• The Simpsons: A comic featured Bart and Milhouse in France to rescue Krusty from Sideshow Bob. A mime couple were delaying them by putting on a show. So Bart, and Milhouse decided to criticize the Mimes skills, eventually making the two mimes cry.
• Thunderbolts: In Thunderbolts (2012), General Ross calmly eating his meal while Deadpool slaughters killer French mimes.

Comic Strips

• Bloom County: Opus attacking a mime with an olive-loaf gets him in court but is widely regarded as a good thing. Bloom Beacon headlines include:
  Mystery man mugs mime with meat—millions make merry
  Hundreds call police praising mystery man
  • It should be noted that this arc was in response to the real-life Bernhard Goetz shooting four men who tried to mug him. While some vilified him, many praised his actions.
• The Far Side: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one's around, and it hits a mime, does anyone care?"
  • They also had one about the Mafia executing people by dressing them as a mime then locking them in a glass box in the middle of the street.
  • One big game hunter to another: "Situation's changed, Jules...take my buffalo gun and hand me the mime rifle.".
• Garfield: There are several strips with mimes as Butt Monkeys. One installment has Jon driving down the road while talking to Garfield. He hits a bump which he ignores, and Garfield casually remarks "You just ran over a mime."
  • To say nothing of the few times Jon has tried being a mime himself.
  • In one strip, when Jon refuses to give Garfield more food, Garfield says: "Do you know what happens to skinny people? They become mimes, Jon. Is that what you want?!! A mime?!
• Pearls Before Swine:
  • One strip involves 2 characters whose speech balloons have popped. They then proceed to argue via body language. However, 2 bystanders confuse them for mimes, and promptly punch them in the head. In the treasury which this strip is in, the author comments that every treasury should end with someone punching a mime.
  • In a 2021 Sunday strip, Stephan Pastis tries to jump the line for COVID-19 vaccination. In the final panel he says that he's at the end of the line, behind felons and mimes. Pig says, "Mimes should be behind felons."
• Pondus: Played for Laughs in both the comic strip and in the cartoon spinoff Rutetid, where (among other things), a military manouver is shown to take place in a "Mime Field", which is (of course), oversown with mimes buried in earth to the hips. In addition, the obligatory "police interrogation routine", where two cops are interrogating a mime, stating: "We are staying til you talk!"
• Wonder Wart Hog: In a short strip titled "Philbert and the Street Entertainer", a street mime starts doing a Mirror Routine mocking Philbert Desanex. He promptly turns into Wonder Wart-Hog and rips the mime to bits, then starts juggling with the severed body parts, to the cheers of onlookers.

Fan Works

• From Calvin & Hobbes: The Series:
  Calvin: WHAT IF HE'S A MURDERER! WHAT IF HE'S A WEREWOLF! WHAT IF HE'S A VAMPIRE! WHAT IF HE'S A ROBBER! WHAT IF HE'S A GOBLIN! WHAT IF HE'S A MIME!
• In Of Love and Bunnies, Connor is revealed to have been terrified of mimes ever since he was a little kid. He freaks out when he realizes that the pretty lady sitting next to him on a mall bench is actually a mime and tries to run, but it doesn't work since his friends had handcuffed him to the bench earlier.
• Losing Control:
  Voldemort: What beings could be more fearsome than Lord Voldemort?
  Azrael: Mimes come to mind but it doesn't help your case that you were bested by a boy in nappies and then again when he was fifteen years old.
• There is a suggestion, in A.A. Pessimal's Discworld fic Clowning Is a Serious Business that the reason why mime artistry is taught at the Fools' Guild, despite its practice being illegal, is to create a hidden élite corps of black-clad Fool/Assassins under the noses of Vetinari, Vimes and the Assassins' Guild. Who would suspect a sad-looking and despised mime artiste of also being a more conventional lethal killer?
  • In a different story which parodies Le Morte D Arthur by setting the action in Lancre, an ancestor of uber-Witch Granny Weatherwax, trapped by mimes who sincerely believe what they are doing is entertaining, obliges her mime artist by genuinely enclosing him in an invisible glass box. The ancestor of Nanny Ogg who is at her side shortly aftereard reminds her of the vital need of providing breathing holes in the box.
• In The Prodigal Daughter: Perdita Hermione's future daughter shows up at Hogwarts.
  Perdita: I've studied so much to prepare for this day. I apprenticed under dark wizards, light lords, Muggle military men, and even mimes.
  Hermione: Mimes? How could you?
  Perdita: I know what frightens you, Mother.
• Silencio inverts this. Not only is the protagonist a superhero mime, he/she is the center of a massive Shipping Dodecahedron.
• A Diplomatic Visit: In chapter 6 of the second sequel, Diplomacy Through Schooling, Trixie comments that she finds mimes' smiles unnerving. Spike agrees.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series:
  Yugi: He's still a human being!
  Marik: He's also a mime.
  Yugi: Oh, in that case, yeah, I'll kick his ass.

Films — Animated

• In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo the gargoyle prepares to hock a loogie on a mime below when Victor stops him.
• Subverted in Tangled. One of the outcasts in the Not Evil, Just Misunderstood Guy Bar 'The Snuggly Duckling' is "into mime." He's actually a pretty well-loved character, despite hardly appearing. He later shows up as part of a Big Damn Heroes rescue, using The Power Of Distracting Mime-Artistry.
• Downplayed in Mary and Max. Max is acquitted of murdering a mime because his mental disorder allegedly means no motivation to do so — "unlike most people."
• The Angry Birds Movie begins with Red having memories about his anger issues...one of which shows him punching a mime.
• In the Animaniacs movie Wakko's Wish, it's stated that Acme Falls would be an Old-World utopia were it not for the mime, who is physically abused even through the saccharine epilogue.
  Narrator: And so everyone in Acme Falls got his or her wish... (safe drops on Mime) except for the Mime, that is.
  Yakko: I don't know about him, but that sure was my wish.
• Shrek Forever After: "Oh great, after mimes, magicians are my favorite people."
• A Goofy Movie: At one point, Goofy runs into a mime and mimes along with him. He pretends to cut an invisible rope the mime is pulling... and a real piano falls on the mime. Goofy and Max walk away whistling as if nothing happened.
• Subverted in Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie: One of the first persons that Captain Underpants "helps" is a mime doing the invisible box routine. Thinking he's trapped in an invisible force field, he tries to break it by punching it, hitting the mime in the face instead and causing him to break character. George and Harold are clearly shocked by this since he just punched a random guy in the face and forced to drag him away from the angry crowds.

Films — Live-Action

• Suburban Commando: Hulk Hogan thinks the force field is real....and tries to break the invisible box with a punch to the face. "Hold on, little buddy; I'll get you out of there!" The poor mime eventually has to break character and vocally protest Hogan's violent attempts to assist him.
• Deleted Vicki Vale line from the 1987 script for Batman (1989): "All street mimes should be executed."
• Die Hard with a Vengeance: John McClane is driving a taxi at high speed across Central Park:
  Zeus: "Are you aiming for some of these people?!"
  John: "No... maybe that mime..."
• The secondary targets in Hot Shots! are an accordian factory and a mime school.
• The Nanny Diaries: Grayer's idiot parents hire two French mimes for his disastrous 6th birthday party.
  Grayer: I thought clowns were supposed to be funny.
  Annie: Well, they're French clowns, Grove.
• Shakes the Clown: Mimes are the lowest class of clown. They're also an allegorical counterpart of sorts for homosexuals ("You only pick on us 'cause we're artists!"), and are thus easy targets for manlier breeds of clown.
• Robin Hood: Men in Tights when the villainous Sheriff of Rottingham and Prince John watch a mime for a few moments then the Sheriff shouts "kill him!" But Prince John changes his mind by saying, "A mime is a terrible thing to waste."
• In Tootsie a distraught Michael Dorsey comforts himself by pushing over a mime in the park.
• In Hot Fuzz, the residents of Sandford see a mime called "The Living Statue" as one of the biggest threats to their campaign to win the "Village of the Year" contest. Several times when Nicholas suspects criminal activity, he is told to get his priorities straight and deal with The Living Statue instead.
• A brief Visual Gag in Gremlins 2: The New Batch has a bunch of mimes being herded out of a police van, who were arrested for seemingly no reason other than being mimes.
• In Scenes From A Mall Woody Allen has to deal with a pesty mime played by Bill Irwin in the shopping mall during the Christmas rush. At the climax, Allen's character decks him — though he quickly apologizes and shoves a wad of cash at him, which makes the mime's day.
• Get out! You stupid mime!
• Pokémon Detective Pikachu: The detectives quickly start hating mimes when a Mr. Mime they’re interrogating stonewalls them, culminating in telling Pikachu to shove it (in pantomime). Pikachu tries to invoke the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique... and promptly jumps into an invisible wall between him and the suspect.
• In Starsky & Hutch the two leads go undercover at Reese Feldman's daughter's Bat Mitzvah as mimes. Their act completely bombs and Feldman starts heckling them to get them to wrap it up already.
• The script for the cancelled 1989 Watchmen movie has Rorschach say that two things he hates are street mimes and the use of recreational drugs.

Literature

• On the Discworld, Lord Vetinari is mostly a very, very rational tyrant who does nothing save for a purpose. But he apparently hates mimes. They get thrown into the scorpion pit with a view to a sign saying "Learn The Words." Not that the citizens have a problem with this. At one point, the leaders of the Guilds are discussing Vetinari:
  "He does have all street-theatre players and mime artists thrown into the scorpion pit."
  "True. But let's not forget that he has his bad points too."
• Subverted in a scene of the historical novel Golden Coffin, though it could be the ancient Roman setting. The mime in question seems to be very popular and the audience enjoys his performance, until he reveals that he's been christened, which immediately splits the audience.
• American Psycho: Patrick Bateman is out, hunting someone to kill, and, passing a street juggler, mentions that if he had been a mime, he would already have been dead.
• Penn & Teller's Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends includes a fictional anecdote about Penn meeting philosopher Albert Camus while doing odd jobs in 1939 Paris.
  I kept my dignity. Even if I went to bed hungry every night, I would not do mime.
• In the American Girls Collection book Lindsey, Ethan's reaction to finding out his mother booked a mime for his bar mitzvah is, "No way. You didn't." When she says that another family enjoyed his performance at their son's bar mitzvah, Ethan retorts that said son is a freak who wears Elmo T-shirts to school.
• In Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing, the title character is severely creeped out by the decor of a warlord's castle, which features murals of wholesale slaughter and furniture made from human bones, and reflects that during "good" festivals, the attendees are not seized by the impulse to run screaming into the night... "well, unless a mime is performing."
• Subverted in The Traveling Triple-C Incorporeal Circus. Main character Cyndricka performs as a mime, and does get a lot of derision and odd looks for it, but also provides enjoyment for the people who stay long enough to watch and become invested. She receives far more animosity from the fact that she is homeless.

Live-Action TV

• Mimes sometimes pop up during any "world's worst"-type games on Whose Line Is It Anyway?.
  (The category is: "Inappropriate Times to Break Into Song.")
  Colin: [in a singsong voice] I'm a MIIIIIIIIIIME!
• In part 2 of The Invisible Man's "Money for Nothing", invisible and temporarily Quicksilver-Mad Darien goes on a crime spree. At the end of the episode he anxiously confirms with his partner that he didn't do too much damage when out of control:
  Darien: Hobbes, was there a guy in a revolving door, and I beat him up?
  Hobbes: Yeah, you bounced his head around, but he's okay.
  Darien: Thank God. Wait a minute, there was a guy on the bike and I released his wheel and flipped him. He went into traffic. Is he okay?
  Hobbes: Oh yeah. He's all right. He survived.
  Darien: Thank god. Oh, yeah. And there was a mime. I beat the hell out of a mime. What happened to him? Is he okay?
  Hobbes: Relax. The mime did not recover.
  Darien: Thank God... You're kidding right?
• In Monty Python's Flying Circus, Graham Chapman's Marcel Marceau impersonation ends with him miming being hit with a 16-ton weight, followed immediately by an actual 16-ton weight falling on him. Cue to footage of a cheering crowd.
• On Empty Nest, a patient of Harry's who's a mime laments about how much hatred they are subject to. "People throw fruit at us!"
• In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk Goes to the Circus," there's this annoying mime who follows the main characters around mimicking their actions, which causes them no end of irritation. It gets so bad that during the summation, Stottlemeyer finally snaps and arrests him for impersonating a police officer.
• On 3rd Rock from the Sun when Evil!Dick traps Dick in an invisible box in the basement, Dick bemoans, "He's turned me into a mime!" His tone implies that it's a Fate Worse than Death.
• Cheers: One episode saw a mime enter the bar in full makeup and performing his trade. The regular cast were generally bemused by his antics. Another episode had Diane practising the craft. She pronounced it "meem." Sam, on the other hand, dislikes Mimes and gets annoyed when Diane asks her instructor to the bar; this time he winds up annoying everyone present until he's asked to leave.
  Diane: Everybody loves a meem!
  Sam: No, everybody loves a clown. Everybody Hates A Mime.
• Alexei Sayle did a stand-up routine on Alexei Sayle's Stuff about how you wouldn't pay money to watch someone actually walk into the wind, sew their fingers together and get shut in a glass box, but if someone pretends to walk into the wind, sew their fingers together and get shut in a glass box...
• A 1980s Saturday Night Live sketch had Randy Quaid trying to tell guest host Pee-Wee Herman that he needs to see a hooker, but is couching it in euphemisms:
  Randy: Well, they wear a lot of makeup...
  Pee-Wee: Clowns!
  Randy: No-o-o, let's just say you'd be embarrassed to be seen with one...
  Pee-Wee: [nods knowingly] ...Mimes!
  • In another Saturday Night Live sketch, a man rents an apartment cheaply because there's a mime (guest host Robin Williams) in it. The new renter ends up killing the mime and is treated like a hero for it.
• In an episode of The Golden Girls, Sophia asks a mime if he wears makeup and doesn't speak because his mother is ashamed of him. When Blanche tells her that nothing she says is going to make him break character, she simply turns and says, "Hey, Buddy, your fly's open." He then falls off his platform and lands face-first on the ground.
• The Governor on The Slammer hates mimes. Apparently he once hired a troupe of mimes to build him a house on the cheap, only when they finished he didn't actually have a house.
• One episode of the horror series Werewolf (1987) features a mime who opens an imaginary door for the hero, who tips him with an imaginary coin. The mime philosophically starts flipping it in the air. It is hinted the mime is possibly More Than He Appears, but the episode ends with the discovery of his murdered corpse.
• On an episode of ALF, Alf worries about the future (since his species live for a long time, he'll still be around when the kids are grown up and moved out while the parents become elderly) and has several imagine spots about where he'll be staying while he hids from the government. In the case of Lynn, he utterly despises her would be mime husband, as he doesn't provide much income and keeps giving her imaginary gifts. (Lynn adores him and loves the makebelieve flowers and jewelry, though.)
• Wings: According to Brian "mimes are not clever. They're white-faced, big-mouthed, glove-wearing, little horrible jerks who live in imaginary boxes."
• Doctor Who: The Doctor states in the episode "Deep Breath" that he will blow up the room if he sees anything he doesn't like, including karaoke and mimes.
• Red Dwarf has this exchange when the group discovers an entire Canary platoon who appear to be frozen in time.
  Holly: They look extraordinarily like something you should be very afraid of: Mime Artists. They chase you down the street, and freeze when you look at them. And everyone laughs at you.
• One of the deaths portrayed in 1000 Ways to Die involves an obnoxious mime who gets his kicks by annoying and messing with passers-by who don't pay any attention to him. When he chokes to death on a pickle, he inadvertently attracts the biggest crowd he's ever gotten because they think it's All Part of the Show.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • In "Living Conditions":
    Buffy: So then Kathy's like, "It's share time." And I'm like, "Oh, yeah? Share this."
    [she punches the air a few times]
    Oz: So either you hit her, or you did your wacky mime routine for her.
    Buffy: Well, I didn't do either, actually. But she deserved it, don't you think?
    Oz: Nobody deserves mime, Buffy.
  • Meta-Example. In the commentary for "Hush", Joss Whedon says that thanks to the skilled, expressive silent acting of the people playing The Gentlemen, he no longer takes mimes lightly.
  • "The Puppet Show" has a moment where Xander reacts with horror to a mime.
• One of Q's punishments from Impractical Jokers has him being chained to a mime for 24 hours. The Montage showed Q slowly having a mental break down as the mime refused to be out out of character for the full 24 hours. At the end of the time limit, the mime finally says a farewell and walks off.
• There is a Running Gag on The Flash of Mirror Master accidentally throwing out a hologram of a mime instead of whatever hologram he is looking for.
• Briefly played for laughs in the Pushing Daisies episode "Circus Circus". Someone clearly hated Rocky the mime enough to kill him, and when Ned briefly revives him for questioning, Emerson gets tired of his schtick real fast.
• Saved by the Bell: The New Class: In the Season 5 episode "Foreign Affairs", Liz, suspecting (wrongly) of Ryan cheating on her with a girl they encounter in Paris, spies on him by disguising as a street-performing mime (with Maria and Katie in tow in the same getup), earning derisive comments from Ryan, who doesn't realize yet who the mimes really are. Once Liz comes clean to Ryan about spying on him near the end of the episode, Ryan reacts with near horror upon realizing what her method of spying involves.
  Ryan: Oh, no! Not the mimes!
• Charmed (1998): Phoebe is on her phone at a street fair when a mime sneaks up behind her and starts copying her gestures without her noticing. Paige comes over and gets him to stop by telling him everyone hates mimes.
• Tales from the Crypt: The Crypt Keeper's opening segment in the episode "Revenge Is The Nuts" has him working as a mime because he needs to raise money to pay off the IRS. Judging by the few paltry coins and single dollar bill in and around his collection skull, it's not going great.

Music

• "Weird Al" Yankovic:
  • The song "She Never Told Me She Was a Mime".
  • In "My Own Eyes", one of the numerous Brain Bleach-inducing incidents the speaker lists is "I saw a mime get hacked to death. With an imaginary cleaver!"
• In Fall Out Boy's "I Don't Care" video, Pete Wentz is shown harrasing a mime on the street.
• In his song "Loco", Andrés Calamaro talks about "containing his murder instinct in front of a mime or a clown".
• In TheOffspring's music video for "Coming for You", a bunch of different kinds of clowns are beating each other to a pulp, but join forces when a mime crashes their fight club. Sadly, the mime curb-stomps all of them.

Podcasts

• In The Hidden Almanac, mimes have been banned within city limits since the Great Mime Uprising of 1893, and there are rumors of an underground Mime cult. (Whether the Uprising itself was inspired by prior mistreatment is unknown; apparently the ringleaders never said what their motivation was.)

Radio

• Jack Dee on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue introducing Sound Charades:
  Jack: The star of Give Us a Clue was Lionel Blair, who single-handedly made mime what it is today. A hated artform, tolerated only in northern Belgium.

Tabletop Games

• One of the many dubious gifts in Crappy Birthday is a week at a mime camp.
• The Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 Edition supplement Drow of the Underdark includes an example of this on Page 202. At the Performers' Amphitheater in the Drow city of Erelhei-Cinlu, poor performers can sometimes expect to be attacked or murdered by spectators; the left column of text on the page ends with the following sentence:
  Recently, a drow wizard spectator summoned a demon to devour an inept mime, to the delight of the rest of the audience.

Video Games

• In the online game Pizza City, you can earn points for running over mimes, eventually getting a reward from the "Mime Prevention League."
• Mimes are but one variety of harmless characters in the Blood series that Caleb can test out his weapons on. He enjoys this a good bit.
• In Gabriel Knight, you have an irritating Mime that would follow Gabriel and just be generally annoying. Later on, you have to use the Mime to piss a Cop off so badly that he actually abandons his motorcycle to chase after him.
• In Planescape: Torment, a mime in the Clerk's Ward is the Butt-Monkey of a magical curse - he is really trapped in an invisible box - and even the usually kind-hearted Fall-From-Grace makes a disparaging throwaway comment at Mimes.
• In CarnEvil, the final stage features a number of mimes throughout... miming. They're the only "enemy" in the game that can do absolutely nothing to you, and you're free to shoot or ignore them at your leisure. The Ross's Game Dungeon episode on this game speculates that the developers didn't bother giving them an attack because they assumed all players would automatically slaughter all mimes on sight and would not need the additional motivation of self-defense.
• In The Sims, a mime sometimes shows up to your party. Not only do the Sims hate him (he shows up to a party that wasn't much fun, and makes it worse instead of better) but the player probably does.
  • The Sims 2 has a viewable movie on the TV about an unhappy mime, probably meant to be the aforementioned party mime, getting booed away. His cat robs a pet store to try to cheer him up with more pets, but it doesn't work because the audience is still booing him.
  • An aversion in the Freetime expansion of The Sims 2. Your Sim will eventually get a job as a mime in the "Entertainment" career track, and the career's description is sympathetic or at least neutral in tone.
• Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness (the first episode, at least) features many mime Mooks, leading up to Final Boss Yog Sethis.
• In Mass Effect 3's last single-player DLC, Citadel, Grunt is playing bouncer for the party. He isn't letting any non-Normandy alum in, but he makes a special case for a mime.
  Grunt: DEFINITELY no mimes allowed! There's no box! There never was!
• Mimes in Guild of Dungeoneering are looked down upon, but in practice they're a type of low-level mage that is just as good as the related "Apprentice" class, with abilities that can dictate the flow of battle or really lay some smack on enemies; with some aspects of Ditto Fighter.
• Gameplay wise, people playing Space Station 13 tend to hate mimes because people use it as an excuse to be absolutely silent in a game that otherwise tends to thrive on character interaction. Lore wise, they tend to be the clown's worst enemy. Whether people are willing to tolerate the clown or the mime more tends to depend on which one is being more annoying, and both can be frustrating people to deal with on any given round.
• In Gourmet Gaffe being thrown to the mimes is considered a worse punishment than death.
• Disguising as either a street performing mime in Sapienza, or entering the level in the Clown suit, Hitman (2016) NPC's don't take kindly to mimes walking around the level:
  Male NPC: Dance for me fool!
  Female NPC: I don't like that creepy outfit *Shudders*
• Cake Mania 5: Lights, Camera, Action! comments that mime customers love other mimes because "someone has to."
• One accessory you can purchase for your avatar in Roblox is a mime mask, which heralds the following description:
  "IT'S A MIME! DESTROY IT!"
• Don't Starve has the playable mime Wes, designed to be the game's Hard Mode (or, in Don't Starve Together, The Load) because he has no useful abilities (even his attention-getting balloons take a hit out of his Sanity Meter) and can't vocalize to the player if his needs are low or hostiles are coming. However, play as Wes is only unlocked by rescuing him in Adventure Mode.
• Grand Theft Auto IV: One of the cabaret acts at club Perestroika is a cowboy-themed mime named Dusty Cowpoke, who's act involves running around on stage while pantomiming cliche western actions such as lassoing cattle and getting into a shootout. It's easily the worst received act by the audience, and Dusty only appears once in the rotation (while all the others performers get about six acts before they start to loop).
• In Kingdom of Loathing, mimes and clowns are treated as inhuman monsters.
• Assassin's Creed: Valhalla: During the "Siege of Paris" DLC, Eivor runs into a mime while looking for clues on where to find Charles the Fat. The mime, naturally, is no help. Later on, during the siege proper, they run into the mime again, who's run afoul of some local fundamentalists, which has scared him enough to break character and help Eivor get to their leader. Exactly what the mime did to piss them off goes unsaid, but we can probably guess.

Web Animation

• An interesting example with the character of Mime on Happy Tree Friends. He seems to be universally appreciated for his performances and is generally well-liked. A shame we're talking about a show that revolves around the cute critters constantly dying, and Mime is no exception. He does die less than the other characters, but only slightly. And although most of the Tree Friends seem to like him and his tricks, some of the Tree Friends, usually Disco Bear and Flippy, have always shown annoyance or perhaps even hatred towards Mime in some episodes.
• Mr Plastimime: Graeme's act doesn't pull in very large crowds, and what few people do come walk out while he's still performing. This is subverted, though, with Betsy, who stays to the end of Graeme's act, and then with everyone else when Graeme saves Betsy from a fire that breaks out in her apartment.

Web Comics

• This Questionable Content strip.
• Scary Go Round: "Why am I such a failure at life? I'm lower than a drug mule or a mime."
• Schlock Mercenary gives us "If a coffee machine passes a baseball bat in the forest, and the only one to see it happen is a mime, what does he say to the police?"
• The protagonist of Chopping Block usually speaks of a "quota" of people he has to kill, but he'll kill mimes even if he's already over quota.
• Gamers in Full Frontal Nerdity opt to be cruel to enemy mimes.◊
• The dreaded Mime Assassin of Casey and Andy.
• Also the Mime Assassin from Perry Bible Fellowship is very despicable.
• xkcd: In "Secretary: Part 3", this is mentioned among Black Hat Guy's long list of crimes.
  Senator: You stole a red Fokker triplane and strafed the Snoopy float at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?
  Black Hat Guy: Got three mimes, too.

Web Original

• The Protectors of the Plot Continuum constitution says...
  10. All discovered mimes will be thrown into a pit, which may or may not be filled with various objects such as scorpions upon their availability.
  10.5. There will be no clemency for these mimes until they learn the words.

Web Videos

• A Channel Awesome sketch featured Doug Walker and Brad Jones attending an anime convention as a pair of incompetent jerkass mimes who talk a lot, disrespect their audience, and barely do any miming. And what miming they do do, is pretty lousy. They don't even like being mimes, they were just misinformed into thinking that mimes are well paid.
• Yogscast Lewis and Simon's play of The Amazing Frog? includes a random Funny Background Event in which a mime is repeatedly knocked to the ground by a policeman, which causes them to break down into hysterical laughter.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons loves this trope.
  • "If a tree falls in the forest on a mime, does anyone care?"
  • The earliest example of this theme appearing was the pivotal episode "Krusty Gets Busted" (which established Sideshow Bob as a recurring villain on the series). After Krusty the Clown has been arrested for armed robbery (when the culprit was actually Sideshow Bob dressed as Krusty), Kent Brockman gives a special TV report that paints Krusty in a very unflattering light, first mentioning that he started his career as a street mime in a small town in Mississippi and going on to criticize him for his history of health problems, the lowbrow content of his TV show, and his general phoniness. The hatred continues at Krusty's trial, when it's discovered that he is illiterate and he is branded a hypocrite for urging kids to learn how to read when he can't read, himself.
  • In "The Squirt and the Whale", Lisa is crying about the death of a beached whale she had tried to rescue when a balloon-animal artist in mime makeup comes up to her and makes her a whale balloon. But as soon as Lisa takes it, the balloon whale loudly pops. So the mime makes a second balloon sculpture - a violin - and begins to silently play it, mocking Lisa.
  • Subverted in "Yokel Chords" when Lisa becomes a tutor to Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel's hillbilly children and takes them to downtown Springfield to see some culture in the city square. Two chainsaw-juggling mimes on unicycles show up - and even though Cletus's kids have never seen a mime before, they are greatly amused.
• The Animaniacs series does it a ton with its "Mime Time" sketches, whose whole purpose is to show a mime going through Amusing Injuries.
• Family Guy does this in the episode "From Method to Madness" in which Stewie joins an acting program for small children. The instructor, Simon, gives a hierarchy of performance: "Legitimate theater, musical theater, stand-up, ventriloquism, magic, mime."
• Garfield and Friends:
  • In "The Carnival Curse", Garfield got even with a Not-So-Phony Psychic who turned him into a werewolf by using her spell-book to turn her into the most horrifying creature of them all: a mime.
  • The "Horror Hostess" two-parter had Garfield defeat a bunch of monsters by using Vivacia's magic wand to turn them into mimes, stating that mimes are the most horrifying thing imaginable.
• Averted in an episode of Dexter's Laboratory where mimes are depicted more heroically: In "The Laughing", Dexter transforms into a were-clown, and since mimes are apparently a natural enemy of clowns, Dee Dee trains with a mime troupe to stop her brother from wreaking further havoc.
• In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius episode "Vanishing Act", when the gang are trying to find the right portal back to their dimension, Cindy looks through a portal and immediately gets frightened upon seeing one of the portals she looked through was filled with mimes.
• The mime gets abused with Amusing Injuries in Paris in Phineas and Ferb: Summer Belongs to You. Finally his makeup gets washed off and he exclaims, "I can talk!"
  • In another episode, Doofenshmirtz traps all mimes in the Tri-State Area in actual invisible boxes. Major Monogram told Perry the Platypus it took some time for it to be noticed because it was initially assumed the mimes had just improved their act.
• In an early episode of Xiaolin Showdown with an Enemy Mime, Clay states that "everybody hates a mime" is the moral, disregarding other suggestions.
  Jack: First order of business when I rule the world - vaporize all mimes.
  Dojo: The mirror gag! I hate mimes.
• One episode of American Dragon: Jake Long features Spud wanting to be a mime. Jake and Trixie conspire to get him to use his Genius Ditz brain instead. Spud spoke during his mime acts and explained it took time to learn to be silent.
• The Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi episode "Trouble with Mimes" had Ami and Yumi encounter a mime named Sy Lantz. After getting sick of him and his mime friends, they get rid of them by tricking them into violating the rule that mimes aren't allowed to speak.
• The Powerpuff Girls once had to stop a clown-turned-mime who was turning everything and everyone soundless, black-and-white, and glum after a truckload of bleach fell into the clown and removed his colors and his voice. The girls saved the day with the power of music... but even after he was turned back to normal, being grateful for having his colors and cheerful personality back, they still kicked the crap out of him at the end of the episode.
• Totally Spies! has a villain named "Jazz Hands" who turned to villainy after his routine was booed offstage. He proceeded to make a device that would turn people into voiceless mimes and targeted more famous entertainers as revenge (Sam and Alex end up being the victims of it as well). He returns later in season 5 as part of the villains group against WHOOP.
• In the Total Drama episode "Phobia Factor", it is revealed that Trent has an intense fear of mimes, due to an incident in his childhood where he got separated from his mom and chased by a mime. He then spends most of the episode being chased by one. Trent is able to outwit the mime by jumping into the water around the island, then pointing out to the mime that he will ruin his makeup if he gets wet, forcing the mime to call it quits. Chris can't help but shudder in discomfort when the mime passes by.
• In the Courage the Cowardly Dog episode Freaky Fred, a regular mime is one of the potential things Courage imagines the titular Fred to be, along with a rotting mummy, a cockroach man, and a Frankenstein monster.
• The Robot and Monster episode "Doctor? No!" involves a disease called robies, which if untreated, would turn a person into a mime. There's even a mime reserve (like an indian reserve) in that same episode!
• In the episode of The Real Ghostbusters "Short Stuff", there's a Freeze-Frame Bonus joke about mimes. In another dimension, the Ghostmaster asks an underling to bring him the Book of Annoying Mortal Beings. When he gets it, he is told by another servant that some other minions were apprehended by the four heroes. He quickly turns to a page in the book where the Ghostbusters are detailed and launches into an angry rant about how much he hates them, which ends with him tearing the page out, and if you look quickly enough, the next page has an entry for Mimes.
• At the end of the Spongebob Squarepants episode "One Coarse Meal," Mr. Krabs admits he is disturbed by mimes.
  Mr. Krabs: Okay, you're beginning to creep me out.
• Downplayed in Steven Universe, in the episode "Sadie's Song". Jamie does a mime act, and the only negative comments made are about his choice of cliche routines.
  Jenny: The box. He's doing the box.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Inverted for laughs. A mime is part of a troupe of performers also consisting of The Bard and a Court Jester. While the bard and jester bicker constantly and call each other hacks, they both agree without question the mime is an artistic genius. It becomes a Running Gag that other people (even the Big Bad) agree the mime is the only member of the troupe who is flawlessly talented.
• In The Critic's parody of a new Dirty Harry sequel, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's assigned partners is a second-rate mime, who promptly explodes.
• In Regular Show, this is the fate of any street performer unlucky enough to be thrown into Street Jail, where they are forcefully turned into mimes and disappear.
• The Cow and Chicken episode "Send in the Clowns" has a family of clowns moving into the neighborhood. At the end of the episode, a family of mimes moves in and Chicken remarks that he thinks he hates mimes even more than clowns.
• In the 2019 Carmen Sandiego cartoon, one of the V.I.L.E. agents is a mime named Mime Bomb, whose effectiveness is that people often deliberately ignore mimes. But on the other hand, his refusal to ever break character makes working with him difficult for other agents, as he only communicates through charades. Carmen herself was nice enough to him until she decided to escape from VILE and after seeing him, she realizes that he watches everyone, including her. After that, even she hates Mime Bomb.
• Zig-zagged in the Be Cool, Scooby-Doo! episode "There Wolf", where Daphne's quirk of the week is dressing and acting like a mime. The rest of the gang ignore her for most of the episode, but they eventually begrudgingly concede that Daphne's mime act did end up helping them solve the mystery. The perpetrator of the episode's "Scooby-Doo" Hoax is also established as having a paranoiac fear of mimes because of something involving mimes that happened to his parents.
• The Johnny Bravo episode "I Used to Be Funny" has Johnny take out his anger at a woman rejecting him for a pair of clowns by beating up a mime.
  Johnny: I feel better already.

Real Life

• There is one famous aversion: Marcel Marceau, who was widely respected by almost everybody.
  • In fact, when two reporters for World News Now got the giggles during a report of his death, the next day, Whoopi Goldberg completely shredded the two, saying that he had an influence on how she acted (and remember, even with Theodore Rex, she is an Oscar-winning actress), that doing anything completely in pantomime is incredibly difficult, and that the two reporters should be ashamed of themselves. He was also friends with Michael Jackson, and inspired him several iconic dance moves such as the Moonwalk Dance.
  • Marcel Marceau and his equally-talented brother Alain picked up mime during World War II while fighting for the French Resistance. They used it as a way to entertain the Jewish children they were smuggling over the border to Switzerland (and keep them quiet in the process, so as to avoid being caught by the Nazis) to save them from The Holocaust. Suffice it to say that those children (and subsequent generations) don't hate mimes as a result.
• In the time of the Roman Empire, Emperor Domitian banned mimes from public performances. This was not a Caligula-esque act of a mercurial tyrant, however, but one of calculated censorship: by precluding public performances mocking/satirizing the government, Domitian sought to restore/enhance public respect for the state. There was also the fact that the mime performances could be in extremely poor taste, as they featured nudity and sadistic execution scenes (some of them not staged).
• And now, the explanation for the quote at the top of the page: David Bowie, in the late 1960s, supplemented his then-struggling career as a musician by joining the avant-garde theatre troupe of Lindsay Kemp, who used mime in the service of performance art (as Bowie puts it in the book Moonage Daydream, "sawing away at Genet and re-interpreting episodes from The Maids and Salome"). Bowie would work his resultant education in acting, stage movement, and characterization into his musical career, and even incorporated mime segments into his Ziggy Stardust-era stage act. As John Peel warned him, however, not all audiences appreciated such touches...
• A common complaint in reviews of Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour is that Cirque du Soleil apparently couldn't come up with a more interesting viewpoint character than a dancing mime in an all-white costume.

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