Glenn Beck on Glenn Beck

June 10, 2009 -- Forbes magazine's new list of the 100 richest and most influential celebrities in America includes Oprah Winfrey, Angelina Jolie, and only one TV news personality -- Fox News' Glenn Beck.

A few years ago, not many people had heard of Glenn Beck. Nowadays, the conservative commentator seems to be everywhere. Over the past two weeks, he's performed before sold-out crowds on his comedy tour. He's had several New York Times No. 1 best-selling books (a new book, "Glenn Beck's Common Sense," is due to hit stores next week); 8 million listeners tune in each week to his radio show; and now he's the host of his own television show on Fox News.

Watch John Stossel's interview with Glenn Beck on "20/20" Friday at 10 p.m. ET.

It's a wild show -- complete with dead fish, parodies of Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" documentary and other stunts, like one in which Beck pretended to pour gasoline on a guest to illustrate the onslaught of government growth.

Oddly enough, all these wild antics are paying off. Beck's audience has exploded. The show airs in the ratings desert known as the late afternoon, yet it now has a bigger audience than every prime time show on all the other cable networks.

How does he do it?

He works constantly, starting at dawn with a commute into Manhattan. He works the morning preparing for his radio and TV shows, and then he spends three hours live on the radio. After that, the work continues. He'll spend a few hours approving book covers, hosting Web chats with fans on his Web site and rewriting the script for his comedy tour. And then he has his hour-long television show.

With the third most-listened-to radio and television shows in the country, those best-sellers and his comedy tour, Beck, people might assume, is just a narcissist desperate for attention.

"Please like me! Please," he joked. "I'll dance! Give me the cymbals."

Beck began his career when he was just a teenager dreaming of becoming a Top 40 disc jockey. He won a contest and was given his first radio show when he was only 13 years old.

"It just shows how low the standards are in this country," he joked.

He kept at it and worked his way up the radio ladder, eventually reaching well-paid jobs at big radio stations. Yet his personal life spun out of control, with problems stemming from his teenage years, when his parents divorced and his mother committed suicide.