Meat Dave in Gundo: A comedy and BBQ festival launches in El Segundo

One day last June, Dave Williamson started getting calls and texts about pink flamingos.

“What time can I pick up these pink flamingos?” read one text.

Williamson was perplexed. He does like beer, quite a lot, so he thought maybe there was a connection.

“Man, what did I do yesterday?” he remembers wondering.

It didn’t take very many messages for Williamson to figure out something was up. He may be from El Segundo, by way of Florida, but he wasn’t born yesterday. He understood that somehow, some way, he’d been pranked. Finally, he figured it out. He found an ad, on Craigslist, with a photo of two pink flamingo lawn ornaments and a post in which somebody claiming to be him said he had some pink flamingos he was giving away. First come, first serve.

Williamson is one of those people who doesn’t fight with life. He prefers to go with the flow. So he went on Amazon, and by the next day, he was well stocked with pink flamingos.

“I texted every single one of those people back, and I said, ‘Hey, if you could pick it up today, this flamingo is yours,” Williamson recalled.

A surprising array of pink flamingo enthusiasts showed up at Williamson’s front fence in El Segundo, including one man with pink flamingo socks, and a Polish man who warned him not to go to Chicago, because “there are many Pollocks there.” He waited in his front yard, in the corner by his array of BBQ smokers, grills, a pizza oven, a wood sign with the words “Meat Dave,” and a larger neon sign appropriated from a Jimmy John’s BBQ restaurant that lit up the words: “Smells Free.” When each flamingo seeker arrived, he reached across his grill and handed out the pink goods.

“All these people came, and I made every single one of them feel like they were the only ones getting something special on this day,” Williamson said.

As he thought about the prank afterward, Williamson was pretty sure it wasn’t intended as friendly. No friend had called him to laughingly ask, “Are you getting pink flamingo messages today?” And no friend of his who’d done this, Williamson concluded, could have resisted finding out how it had played out.

“And so I was like, ‘Man, someone just did this to be mean.’ But what they didn’t realize is I made 14 new friends, and I have a new seven minutes in my act because of it.”

He told this story last month on the “Breaking Into Comedic Passion” podcast. He is a standup comedian of some national fame, a BBQ pitmaster of great local and increasingly regional repute, the host of the Meat Dave podcast, and the organizer of a uniquely El Segundo event coming this August that will combine Williamson’s worlds, called the Gundo Comedy & BBQ Festival.

He is somebody who mines his day-to-day life for every last morsel of fun he can pull out of it, and not just for himself. Hence his comedy – he’s been making his living as a touring stand-up comedian for 15 years – and his more newly acquired mastery of the BBQ pit, which he took up in a serious way about six years ago.

There are few things one person can do for another more soul-lifting than producing a laugh, or a mouth-watering meal.

“Most comedians, and human beings in general, deep down are just looking for gratification,” Williamson said. “But the way I always look at it is, I don’t think it’s a mistake that I’ve been drawn towards both of these communities, comedy and BBQ. Because a lot of the people who choose to do this are people who like to make other people happy.”

The Gundo Comedy & BBQ Fest is a new iteration of what was formerly only a comedy festival, which Williamson launched in 2015 as a way to give back to his community and raise money for his son’s little league team. The festival has been in hibernation since the pandemic. This year, not only is the Gundo fest back, but it’s coming out of the gates in tandem with the El Segundo Art Walk. The first day of the weeklong festival will take place as part of ESAW, kicking off with a stand-up comedy show at Old Town Music Hall on August 24 – and with most shows also featuring BBQ, some of it by Williamson himself, most by BBQ masters from around the nation.

Williamson wasn’t sure he was going to bring the festival back. Netflix has launched its own comedy festival in LA since the Gundo fest last appeared, and he is on the road more than ever.

But when the notion of combining his two passions (and skills) crossed his mind, he couldn’t resist making it happen.

“I was trying to figure out what was the right way to bring the festival back and just realized, it makes so much sense to rebrand it as the truest form of me and what I love bringing to people, which is barbeque and comedy,” Williamson said. “That way, I get to bring all my super BBQ buddies, who I love going to see at festivals and competitions all around the country. Now I get to show them El Segundo, and I get to show them my comedy friends. And vice versa, my comedy friends get to eat barbeque, and all together we get to bring both worlds and put them together into a super unique event.”

The event’s tagline is “Funny. Meats. Yummy.”

The Gundo festival’s revival and BBQ-bolstered reinvention is happening in part due to ESAW. The Art Walk’s event producer, John McCullough, caught one of Williamson’s shows at South Bay Customs, the Smoky Hollow motorcycle shop that is also a music and occasionally a comedy venue. Williamson was not only performing, but barbequing, handing out samples of his cooking to the audience. As far as audience-comedian dynamics go, it almost wasn’t fair. The crowd was almost deliriously happy, well-fed and laughing. McCullough is the vice president of an expanding regional restaurant chain with 19 locations and a founder of the famed Prohibition NYE at LA’s Union Station. His mind pops ideas like a popcorn maker. As he took in Williamson’s unique fusion of BBQ and comedy, another idea popped.

He walked straight up to Williamson.

“He’s in the back, rearranging his meat section, his tri tips,” McCullough recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Dave, this has got to be part of the Art Walk.’”

“Okay,” Williamson said. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Like the flamingo situation, Williamson likewise saw an opportunity. McCullough, in this case, was his pink flamingo. He knew this was the guy who could help him revive the Gundo.

“Do you want to help me revive the festival?” he asked.

Not really, McCullough thought to himself. He had his hands full, raising his young kids, opening restaurants, and throwing himself almost ridiculously all in on the Art Walk each year – for little to no money, but for the simple love of all things El Segundo. And maybe that is what swayed him. A festival that skips around to all the cool venues in town, combining BBQ, beer, and comedy – somehow, it just seemed just too El Segundo to not bring back to life.

“Okay,” McCullough said. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”

Straight outta Florida

Growing up, Williamson had a pretty good idea how his life was going to unfold. It didn’t involve California. He couldn’t have told you what a pitmaster was. And it sure didn’t have anything to do with comedy. He was going to join his family’s automobile business, Williamson Buick GMC.

The Williamsons owned car dealerships throughout South Florida. It was already a multigenerational business that had been around over a half century. It felt inevitable he would join it.

Williamson wasn’t the class clown and didn’t think of himself as particularly funny. But even as a little kid, he took note of comedy’s odd power over the adults in his life.

“I was addicted to Saturday Night Live,” he said on the podcast. “It was cool to me to see my parents crack up at Saturday Night Live. For me, anyone who had the power to make these adults that I looked up to just crack up laughing – I just always admired a lot of the people on [SNL].”

When it came time for college, Williamson attended business school at Auburn University in Alabama, preparing himself for the automotive industry. One of his required classes outside of business was called “Great Books,” and the professor told him to wait after class one day to talk about a paper he’d written. Williamson thought he was probably in trouble, that the professor had figured out he’d winged it, staying up all night to get his paper done. What he heard instead flabbergasted him.

“This is a really good paper,” the professor said. “Your insights are just really unlike anyone else’s in class. I really think you should consider changing your major to creative writing.”

Williamson was pleased but wasn’t about to quit business school. “Nah,” he thought. “That’s not my future.”

But he did pick up creative writing as a minor, and began writing for the school paper. As he is wont to do, he combined his passions – he loved water polo and played the sport at Auburn, so he wrote about it, but did so with an unexpected comedic verve.

“I would get mad that there were all these articles on the football team and the baseball team and the basketball team, but nothing on the fringe sports,” he recalled. “So, I was like, I’ll write about those sports. And I made every article funny, so people would want to read it. And then I started thinking up some other funny ideas of articles I could write, and before I knew it, I was writing for this student magazine.”

Williamson met his future wife at Auburn and followed her to Charlotte, North Carolina after they graduated. She knew he loved Saturday Night Live, so she told him about a comedy sketch group that was popular in town and proposed going to the show for a date. They went, and Williamson couldn’t believe how cool it was to see comedy live.

“I went there and just sat in awe during the whole thing,” Williamson said. “Like, ‘I can’t believe something like this exists.”

He approached the group and told them he’d like to try writing for them, but was told that they did all their own writing. If he wanted to write for them, he’d have to try out to join the group. He’d never performed in his life, but he wrote some sketches, had a tryout, and was brought into the sketch group. Suddenly he was performing comedy every weekend. He’d found what he loved.

“I was addicted,” Williamson said.

After two years in Charlotte, Williamson moved back to Florida and joined the family business. To get his comedy fix, he started doing stand-up. He found that he liked it even more than sketch shows.

“I found out with stand-up comedy, I could just think of an idea on the way to the club, say it straight out of my mouth and get instant feedback,” he said. “All you needed was your brain, a microphone, and an audience.”

“A lot of people don’t realize, a lot of you are stand-up comics in your everyday life. Because when you tell a story to your friends and they laugh, you realize, ‘Oh, okay, this is the funny part. This is the part that is too much of a lull. It’s unnecessary.’ And then when you tell a story over and over again, you’re doing the same thing a stand-up comic does, which is trim the fat from the story and maybe exaggerate a certain part to make it funnier. And I just really enjoyed that process, so I started leaning into stand-up comedy, and I fell in love with it.”

For a few years, Williamson worked in the car business and did stand-up comedy as a sideline. But he couldn’t help comparing the two experiences. Comedy kept winning out.

“I would spend my entire day in the car business, at this amazing family business that my family had built for generations, a business that really cared about giving people a good place to work and an honest experience,” he said. “And still, at the end of the day, most of the time if people knock on your door, it was because they were going to complain about something, or had a problem, or were trying to get some money out of you. And then I go do stand-up at the comedy club that night, and there would be 300 people who couldn’t wait to shake my hand after the show and tell me that they were having a rough week and I really made their day. I really had to stick with that feeling, of being a positive part of people’s life and making their day.”

He was also making a name for himself in comedy. In 2012, the Miami New Times named him the city’s best stand-up comedian.

“The genius of Dave Williamson’s comedy: It’s your life, but funnier,” the New Times reported. “Williamson is an exactly average human being, a man of median age who lives in the burbs with his wife and kids. His height is average, he’s neither grossly over- nor underweight, and he doesn’t have a big nose or a Gilbert Gottfried voice or, really, any distinguishing physical characteristics. Like you, he enjoys telling stories about his kids, his own childhood growing up in Miami, and hanging out with his college buddies back in the day. But unlike you, his stories are unpretentious, genuinely interesting, and, most important, atomically funny. The normal world in which he lives — in which we all live — is ridiculous enough on its own; he’s just especially talented at pointing that out.”

Not long after, Williamson went all-in on comedy. He and his wife and two very young boys packed up an RV for what was supposed to be a four month road trip. Williamson booked gigs across the country as they made their way towards California.

Williamson talked about this experience on his 2019 album, Trying My Hardest.

“It was the best time in my life,” Williamson said. “It was both great for me professionally and personally. Personally, I was never closer to my family, literally and figuratively. Professionally, I didn’t have to try so hard to come up with new stories to tell on stage because I lived in an RV with my wife and two kids. A lot of stuff happened.”

The trip would last 18 months. He would make a web series about it for Nickelodeon, and El Segundo became the final destination.

Gundo or bust

El Segundo has a place in comedy history. Throughout the groundbreaking 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son, about a junkyard dealer and his son in South Central, comedian Redd Foxx, playing Fred Sanford, brings up El Segundo in unexpected ways. When someone asked him about the cheap Ripple wine he’s drinking in one episode, he says it comes from “the vineyards of El Segundo.” When his long-suffering son Lamont is going out on a date wearing a cologne he proudly says is called Days of Paris, Fred responds, “Well, it smells like Nights in El Segundo,” referencing the famously bad industrial smells the town was once known for. In another episode, when Fred thinks he’s having a heart attack, he looks to the sky and tells his late wife he’s “coming to El Segundo.”

Williamson and his family didn’t realize they were so close to heaven when they pulled their RV into Dockweiler Beach at the end of their cross country voyage. Coming from Florida, they knew they wanted to find a place to live by the beach. They stayed at Dockweiler for months while scouting coastal communities, but never visited El Segundo, even though a friend in Playa kept telling Williamson, “You’ve got to check out El Segundo. All my friends who have kids live in El Segundo.”

“So we started going up and eating dinner at some of the different restaurants and looking around and going to the parks,” Williamson said. “And we just realized, ‘Man, this is a really cool area,’ and so we found a place. It was one of the best decisions we ever made, because El Segundo has been just such a blessing to us. I love the community so much.”

Williamson’s comedy career quickly took off. El Segundo also had great appeal for a nationally touring comedian, due to its proximity to LAX. He’d always been a fan of good BBQ, and the South Bay at that time didn’t have much, so out on the road he started hunting it out.

“I really made it a point to find the best barbecue restaurant in every city I went to,” he said. “It was fun for me.”

He ended up working in Texas a lot, and on one tour, one of the folks showing him around asked if he liked BBQ.

“I love barbecue,” he replied. “I’m kind of an expert.”

“Oh, you’re gonna have some of the best brisket ever at this place we’re taking you tomorrow.”

“What’s brisket?” Williamson asked.

“Oh, you don’t know shit about BBQ, do you?” came the reply.

So he went and had real Texas style barbeque brisket, which doesn’t use a sauce but a spice rub. It was a life-changing experience. He kept getting booked in Texas, and kept getting deeper into BBQ.

“Every time I’d go back home after a weekend of working comedy clubs in Texas, I’d get mad,” Williamson said. “I’d be like, ‘Man, I want to eat like that here.’ So finally I said, you know what? I am going to teach myself.”

In the age of YouTube, learning the tricks of great pitmasters proved to be surprisingly accessible. Williamson assembled an array of smokers and grills and he cooked every chance he had, trying and failing and more and more succeeding. He just kept practicing. In 2019, he launched the Meat Dave podcast, in which he interviews BBQ masters all throughout his travels. Suddenly he was a key player in the larger BBQ universe, and his learning increased exponentially. By now, he is, by all accounts, a high level pitmaster himself.

He quickly understood that this wasn’t so different from stand-up comedy. When done well, it was something that made people love you.

“If someone comes over to your house and you cook a bunch of burgers for them, they’re going to be grateful,” he said. “It’s really cool that you made burgers for them. But if you made a brisket for them, and they know that you sacrificed sleep and stayed up and fed your smoker and spent 12 hours cooking a brisket and it just came out amazing – then you’ve just given them a gift, something they can’t get every day. It resonates with people.”

A funny thing started happening. Everywhere he went, people wanted to talk BBQ. Even at gigs, the conversation was more likely to be about an Instagram post someone had seen of Williamson with a beautifully finished steak than about the comedy routine he’d just performed. People also tried to convince him to perform at barbeque joints, an idea that didn’t make much sense to him until the pandemic hit and suddenly the idea of what a venue could be broadened. He frequently tours with comedian Bert Kreischer, who had a smoker built onto his tour bus.

“So we would end up just cooking food outside the tour bus,” Williamson said. “During the pandemic, restaurants were closed all over the country, so we had to cook for ourselves, and that just became a big part of who we were – like, hey, we are the guys who tailgate our own shows. Then so many comics and audience members said they wanted to taste my barbecue, and so when I started working at comedy clubs around the country, I’d find ways to borrow a smoker and comedy clubs would incorporate it into their menu.”

And yes, he actually started performing at BBQ joints.

For three years, people asked me to come to their barbecue restaurants and do a show, and I said, ‘That’s not how comedy works,´” And then all that logic got thrown out the window with the pandemic.”

His worlds had collided. And so when the time came to relaunch his comedy festival, it made perfect sense to celebrate both worlds. That’s how the Gundo Comedy and BBQ Festival was born anew.

Unexpected combinations tend to be at the heart of all good comedy and great cooking. El Segundo, the little town with more Fortune 500 companies than any other city in California other than San Francisco, specializes in the unexpected. It’s small town Mayberry crossed with a tech incubator, a town that produces great beer alongside galaxy-bending space technology. The Gundo Comedy and BBQ Festival will revel in such unlikely combinations.

“The best comedy is always rooted in the truth,” Williamson said. “Of course, we exaggerate. We might put two stories together into one. There’s definitely some liberties taken. But the stuff that’s rooted in reality…that’s the best comedy, for sure. And it sounds cheesy, but with barbecue, you tell a story as well. Just like comedy, barbecue is equal parts following a game plan or following a recipe, but at the same time, there’s some art to it, where you deviate. The cooking might not be the same twice, or ever. People always ask me, ‘How much time do I need to cook this brisket?´ And I say, ‘Dude, you better give yourself somewhere between eight and 12 hours.’ You just don’t know, man. It’s a different journey every single time.”

The Gundo Comedy & BBQ Fest runs from August 24 to 31 takes place at the Old Town Music Hall, Five Point Brewery, Brewport, R6 Distillery, Smoky Hollow, and WWOO Kitchen. For more information and tickets, see GundoComedyBBQ.com.