Before becoming a bankable Hollywood star, Perry was a bankable star on the “chitlin circuit,” raking in millions of dollars from loyal, exclusively black audiences. Perry became a celebrity before ever trespassing the mainstream, taking his characters directly to his core audience. Beck took his audience from the mainstream and disappeared into the conservative circuit.
As Weekly Standard writer Jonathan Last noted on his personal blog, “While everyone else is writing about what Buzzfeed and Huffington Post are doing (which are also both interesting) it’s like The Blaze is tearing up the world and making money hand over fist in some alternate universe which is invisible to media reporters in the mainstream.”