gloomy Gus

gloomy Gus

Someone who is particularly somber or pessimistic. "Gloomy Gus" was a character in the comic strip Happy Houligan. Of course he doesn’t think we'll get there in time—he's a real Gloomy Gus. Quit being a gloomy Gus and smile for the camera!
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

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.”
Endangered Phrases by Steven D. Price
See also:
  • skeleton at the feast
  • rocket scientist, you don't have to be a
  • Bite your tongue!
  • pout
  • pout about
  • pout about (someone or something)
  • Colonel Blimp
  • there's no flies on him/her
  • milktoast
  • milquetoast
References in periodicals archive
Gloomy Gus is a Bergsonian machine, totally bound by behavioural routines, and his inability to think rather than follow a rehearsed routine causes his death.
Morace in particular argues that Coover's fiction revolves around the conflict between pattern-keeper and pattern-breaker, and quotes the sculptor Meyer in Gloomy Gus as saying that the real object of a game is the 'sudden burst of freedom' (Gloomy Gus, p.
(11) This motif is found in The Origin of the Brunists, Universal Baseball Association, 'The Kid', The Public Burning, A Political Fable, Pinocchio in Venice, John's Wife, Ghost Town, plus lesser variations in 'Morris in Chains', 'Panel Game', Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears?, and Gerald's Party.
Robert Coover: the metaphysics of bondage