gloomy Gus

A perpetually unhappy person. Gloomy Gus was a character in Happy Houligan, one of the earliest (1900) newspaper comic strips. Unlike his jovial brother Happy, saturnine Gus never smiled because he never found any reason to. For much of the 20th century, pessimists and anyone else who happened to look sad was referred to as a “gloomy Gus.”