Depressed Pim

About

Depressed Pim or Sad Pim is a reaction image of the character Pim from Smiling Friends drawn in a hyper-realistic style with a depressed, catatonic or withered expression on his face. The Pim render was created by artist Dan Peacock and appeared at the end of the pilot episode of Smiling Friends, which aired on April 1st, 2020. Following its premiere, the image began to see use in memes as a reaction image and in image macros to convey depression or agony.

Origin

On April 1st, 2020, the pilot episode of Smiling Friends premiered on Adult Swim, later airing on January 10th, 2022, as the premiere episode of season one. At the end of the episode, a depressed client of the Smiling Friends goes on a depressing rant to Pim, which sends him into a depressive episode. Later, when at Smiling Friends HQ, Pim is seen sitting in a chair, still catatonic, rotting with the same depressed expression in a hyper-realistic style (shown below).

The earliest known meme to use the expression, although not the hyper-realistic render, was posted to the subreddit /r/adultswim^[1] on April 4th, 2020, garnering over 730 upvotes in four years (shown below, left). The meme references the production history of Smiling Friends, where it was originally not picked up for a full season by Adult Swim, then later picked up after calls for a full season online.

On April 5th, another meme using the hyper-realistic render was posted to /r/adultswim,^[2] garnering over 30 upvotes in the same span of time (shown below, right).

The hyper-realistic edit was notably created by artist Dan Peacock, aka @PencilMoose on X.^[3]

Spread

The meme continued to spread over the following years. On June 28th, 2022, the Facebook^[4] page Memes posted an image macro using the image, garnering over 15,000 reactions and 10,000 shares in two years (shown below).

On September 7th, Redditor u/porpint posted a photo of a cookie baked into the shape of the face to /r/smilingfriends,^[5] garnering over 2,200 upvotes in two years (shown below, left). On June 1st, 2024, Redditor u/Random-Gif-Bot posted a meme to /r/dankmemes^[6] using the face that gained over 500 upvotes in four days (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References