Dunky the Frog and the Politics of Irony

Abstract

Although scholars have used poststructural and postmodern frameworks to understand the power relations of sport, critical research has rarely considered a politics of irony in the sporting realm. Using the controversial frog logo of Québec City’s professional basketball team, we explore irony as a reading strategy and method of critique that is already ambivalent. As a self-directed stereotype, Dunky the Frog is unique in its emergence through irony. It appears to be an offensive anti-French mascot intended by the team’s French Canadian owner to be an innocuous comic prop. This ironic use of frog imagery places the competing desires of liberalist sublimation and French Canadian self-representation into an irresolvable contradiction, one that encourages an alternative reading of mascot controversies and identity politics.

The Banff Indian Days tourism festivals

“…If the parody of a representation is lost in the consumption of it because the consumer lacks the necessary resources to reinterpret it, the readings can actually support damaging stereotypes of racial subjectivities. Unfortunately, there are no ways to ensure that practices of parody will reach their intended audience (Brayton & Alexander, 2007;Robidoux, 2006). Accordingly, the subversive value of any parody entirely depends upon the contexts and receptions in which the disruptions occur.…”