groaner

Noun

groaner (plural groaners)

1. One who groans or complains.
   • I don’t need to hear from groaners like you.
2. (informal) A work of extremely low quality, so bad as to inspire groaning.
   • That movie was a real groaner.
   • Some groaners are converted into running gags, as when Joel and his brother (Max Greenfield) get in a duel of parting, one-last-thing-before-you-go affirmations.2014 June 26, A. A. Dowd, “Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler Spoof Rom-com Clichés in They Came Together”, in The A.V. Club, archived from the original on 07 Dec 2017
3. (informal) A particularly egregious joke, especially a pun.
   • From the cleverest repartee to the worst groaner, people use and respond to puns, but sometimes find them hard to define.1993, Peggy O'Brien, Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 127
   • In the '40s, I remember ludicrous puns thought to be funny and repeated by teenagers, sometimes to a chorus of laughter. Here is a groaner example: "Mother, get off the rafters. That is no way to get on the beam." Naturally, to understand the joke, it was necessary to know the idiom of the day....2005, Donald W. McCaffrey, The Road to Comedy: The Films of Bob Hope, Greenwood Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 2

   Antonyms:

   knee slapper

4. (slang) A whistling buoy.