Third time is a charm: The return of the Gundo Comedy & BBQ Festival
If Dave Williamson dies and goes to heaven, it will look something like this. It’s a Sunday afternoon at El Segundo’s Library Park, and one of the best pitmasters in the world is behind a Santa Maria grill, tomahawk steaks hanging over the fire above an assortment of peppers and onions slow-cooking in the live flame. A whole pig turns on a spit. Somewhere nearby, 2,000 chicken wings come out of a smoker. A hundred kids are packed into a gazebo, mesmerized by a juggler, while their parents stand around the edges with plates of brisket. Three full days of belly laughs are still resonating in Williamson’s heart, soul, and very innards. He’ll know this is heaven, because he will have already been there — at his very own Gundo Comedy & BBQ Festival. El Segundo has long held a spot in the comedic imagination as a kind of afterlife. Throughout the 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son, Redd Foxx’s Fred Sanford invoked the town in unexpected ways, and in one episode, certain he was having a heart attack, looked to the sky and told his late wife he was “coming to El Segundo.” Williamson — comedian, pitmaster, and El Segundo resident — has spent the last three years making the case that Fred was…
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