"sober face" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It is typically used to describe someone who appears serious, grave, or not easily amused. Example: Despite the comedian's best efforts, the audience remained unmoved, their faces all wearing a sober expression.
"To be perfectly frank, sexual desire has me baffled," Sumire told me once, making a sober face.
And when he picked me up at the wretched Petersburg airport upon my return there was something like incumbent victory upon his prune-dry, oddly sober face.
This morning, all was quiet, the streets were clean and Olympic officials tried to put a sober face on the drunken disorder.
Of course, once they had almost busted their lungs screaming "touchdown," the President's men tried to put a sober face on things.
Hollywood has always put on a sober face at the end of year, as the Golden Globes and Academy Awards loom.
Around the time of the Goncourt award, in November, Daoud made the publicity rounds in Paris, revealing a quiet, sober face and a mild-mannered persona that presented a startling contrast to the heat of his written words.
With the help of a 12-step programme she gets clean and sober, facing "the terrible, wrenching terror of saying goodbye to my longest and most consistent relationship".
They reminisced about when they first got them, just two guys in old cowboy hats and cowboy boots jawboning, oblivious to the phalanx of gray suits and sober faces surrounding them.
I saw it in the sober faces and strong arms of the men who helped 84-year-old Dorli Rainey to safety after she was pepper-sprayed at an Occupy rally in Seattle.
Brownlee biographer Franklin Foster speculates that the selection of a female candidate to run against the so-called "sober faced seducer" was a deliberate strategic decision by Aberhart, and noted further that "aside from Aberhart himself, [Social Credit] could not have fielded a stronger candidate" in Ponoka.
These analyses were followed up with one-sample t-tests where appropriate, against a value of 50% for the preference data and 4.5 for the rating data (each value reflecting equal preference or rating for the intoxicated and sober faces).
