The crowd leapt to its feet, the performer Lizzo among them. It was a measure of the reverence for Perry’s achievements, and the recent warmer embrace of his work. Spike Lee, who once infamously described Perry’s work using a racial slur, has since distanced himself from that comment. (For what it’s worth, aside from “Inside Man,” Perry told me, “there’s not a lot of Spike Lee films that I get or understand.”) And Perry is no longer one of the very few black voices in film and television. The rise of power brokers like Ava DuVernay, Donald Glover and Issa Rae, Perry said, has “lifted all of the pressure.”

Many of the stories Perry tells adhere to his tried-and-true formula; threaded with moralizing, they confront tough issues like abuse before shifting to levity, all of which proved deeply cathartic for audiences, and for Perry himself.

Perry grew up in New Orleans with an abusive father, and was sexually molested by several adults. To cope, he learned to slip into a rich, imaginary world. “It would bring me so much joy, no matter what was going on with me as a kid,” he said.

It was only recently that Perry realized that he goes to that same place to write. “I literally have to push them out of my head to go on to the next show, to make them stop talking,” he said.

He wrote all six new Viacom shows, along with a new season of “The Haves and the Have Nots,” for Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network — 200 episodes in all — in six months. The writing overlapped with the 43-city Madea farewell tour earlier this year, and I caught a glimpse of what that workload looked like at Radio City Music Hall in May.