Politics & Power Quote by Paul Hogan

Hogan’s line lands like a friendly jab, the kind you can deliver only if you’re already inside the room - or at least have been welcomed into it. “Americans as a whole” is a disarming setup: he flattens a huge, stereotype-heavy category into something almost boringly normal, then pivots to the punchline. The real target isn’t the U.S.; it’s Los Angeles, a city that practically markets its own exceptionalism. Calling Angelinos “different” is both a wink at Hollywood weirdness and an acknowledgment that L.A. lives in a parallel ecosystem where image is currency and reality is negotiable.

The subtext is classic outsider humor. Hogan, the Australian who became globally legible through Crocodile Dundee, built a persona on relaxed confidence confronting American spectacle. Here, he flips the usual tourism narrative: instead of America being the oddity, the oddity is a particular American enclave that already thinks of itself as a category apart. It’s teasing, but it also flatters - Angelinos love being told they’re unlike the rest of the country, even when it’s meant as criticism.

Context matters because Hogan’s celebrity is inseparable from transpacific culture traffic. In the late 20th century, L.A. was the world’s dream factory and its self-parody. The joke works because everyone recognizes the stereotype: spiritual trends, reinvention, status signaling, performative wellness, aspiring everything. Hogan doesn’t need to list any of it. “Different” does the work, letting the audience fill in the caricature - and laugh at a city that’s always half-performing for an imagined camera.