I love the art of miming, and I've seen many times in movies, ads, and newspaper strips (like Bloom County) and such mimes being treated as annoying or just mocked. This is purely anecdotal of course so take it with whatever salt you wish. Was there an event(s) or a person that made mimes be seen negatively at some point in American history?
The naive figure in high trousers and French sailor's shirt was made standard by Marcel Marceau, a student of Etienne Decroux, who became immensely popular in the 1950's and '60's, and continued to be a touring artist until he was quite old. Marceau's performances consisted of short pieces, like The Four Seasons, The Small Café, The Tango Dancer. A great part of the joy of his performance was in seeing the immense skill he had in the illusions- creating imaginary walls, wine glasses, a dog on a leash- as well as showing off the Decroux techniques of body control: isolations, translations- that made it possible to create a very clear narrative with a series of poses, to create the essence of a marionette or a bird or the machine movement of a robot, to walk in place ( or glide backwards, something later utilized by Michael Jackson). There were very soon many similar mimes, like Claude Kipnis, Tony Montanaro and Paul Curtis, some of whom both performed and taught the techniques to others. But though there were some mime troupes, like the Claude Kipnis troupe and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, ( and troupes continue in eastern Europe), for the most part mime was an odd duck that did not fit well into the either-dance-or-theater performing arts, and it often became another tool in the acting toolbox, to be used as needed- mime could broaden into physical theater. Actors could learn mime, and mimes could become actors- like Anthony Daniels, the mime/actor who played C3PO in Star Wars or Robin Williams, who easily moved from mime into acting.
Was it a lack of roles and parts, artist grants, and theater spaces in the performing arts that created so many street mimes? Was it simply the discovery that just the techniques of illusion/pantomime could be performed- that an imaginary tug-of-war lasting a few seconds was enough to get some spare change? Or was it inherent in the teaching? As Karl Koepfer states , "Mime culture is school culture: it equates mime above all with the teaching of techniques, exercises, the execution of small "episodes" or sketches. None of the Decroux-influenced books has any guidance about how one constructs narratives from physical actions". In any case, unlike the pieces of Marceau, Kipnis, Montanaro, etc. those street tricks had no plot, no thought, nothing much to say. And were much like a dancing bear; once you've seen the bear dance, it's not nearly as interesting to see the bear dance again; and, after the tenth time, the bear is really boring. In their obit for Marceau, the LA Times noted "He especially rued the street mimes who worked popular tourist attractions such as San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. “People think, ‘Oh my God, not again!’ when they see them and miss the fact that mime, done well, is like nothing else,”
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-sep-24-me-marceau24-story.html