Pablo Escobar Waiting
Published September 20, 2026
Pablo Escobar Waiting, also called Sad Pablo Escobar, is a three-panel image macro pulled from Netflix's Narcos, where Wagner Moura's Escobar sits alone in three different spots with a hollow, defeated stare1. Published anonymously on Meme Generator in October 2016, one month after Narcos season 2 aired, the template turned trivial waiting frustrations into one of Reddit's go-to reaction formats through 2017 and 20182.
Overview
The template pairs three screencaps of Wagner Moura's Escobar looking utterly checked out: sitting in an empty field, slumped at a kitchen table, and staring into a drained backyard pool2. Users stack a caption on top describing something they are waiting for, and the three panels sell the emotional arc of that wait, from bored to miserable to fully broken. The joke works because the images are pulled from genuinely heavy dramatic beats in Narcos season 2, so the mismatch between real cartel-boss despair and, say, a delayed food order is what makes the format land3.
Captions typically follow a 'When...' setup: waiting on a package, waiting for the next episode of a show, waiting for a coworker to show up. The static, unedited screengrabs and the lack of a payoff panel keep the format easy to remix, which is how it stayed in circulation on subreddits like /r/funny and /r/AdviceAnimals for close to two years2.
Origin & Background
How It Spread
How to Use This Meme
The common convention is to add a single 'When...' caption at the top of the three-panel image describing whatever you are stuck waiting for, then let Moura's unedited screencaps do the emotional work. The waits are usually low-stakes and mundane, since the gag comes from applying Escobar's Narcos-level despair to something trivial2.