No wan cares to hear what Hogan calls “Th’ short an’ simple scandals iv th’ poor.”

In Dunne’s Mr. Dooley idiom, the line satirizes how public attention and moral outrage tend to follow wealth and status. “Hogan” (a recurring working-class voice in the Dooley circle) twists Gray’s famous phrase “the short and simple annals of the poor” into “scandals,” implying that even when the poor have dramas, missteps, or wrongdoing, society treats them as uninteresting and unnewsworthy. The joke lands as social criticism: reputations, “scandal,” and even sympathy are distributed unevenly, with the powerful granted both scrutiny and significance, while the poor are denied narrative importance altogether.