My Uncle on Television with Woody Allen—and Forty Years Later

In February of 1967, Marty Allen and Steve Rossi were on the television show, What’s My Line? and Woody Allen was on the panel.

Steve Rossi is my uncle, and “Rossi” is his stage name. His actual last name is Tafarella. In the decades immediately following World War II, American entertainers with “ethnic” sounding names would often “Anglicize” or “simplify” them for mass consumption.

Anyway, I noticed that someone had posted the “Allen & Rossi” segment of the show on YouTube, and here it is (my uncle is the one on the left):

Here’s some current video of my uncle, some forty years later, now in his late 70s, writing jokes at a kitchen table, and still as happy and bemusing as ever: