Somewhere between the bus stop and the bowl haircut, Jack Ferver became one of the strangest one-hit wonders in modern advertising history. The 2007 Starburst commercial that introduced “the Little Lad” — a tiny, Edwardian-coded sprite shrieking his love for Berries and Creme — was an immediate cult artifact, a piece of post-modern weirdness that ad-trade write-ups would later cite as a high point of the form, and that YouTube would refuse to let die.
Then came TikTok. Then came the costume deal. Then came two million followers in a month.
And then, almost as quickly as he reappeared, the Little Lad receded — replaced, on the other side of the screen, by a working artist whose actual career is far stranger and more rigorous than the commercial that made him a meme.
The 30-second ad that wouldn’t go away
The Starburst spot, directed by Randy Krallman, hit airwaves in March 2007 to promote the new Berries and Creme flavor. Two guys at a Greyhound-style bus station eat candy. A small man in an anachronistic period costume — somewhere between Edwardian schoolboy and storybook pageboy — interrupts them, demands clarification about the flavor, and detonates into a high-pitched song and a single, decisive heel-kick.
The commercial barely sold candy. It sold a feeling — uncanny, slightly menacing, gleeful in a way that didn’t match the product. Starburst leaned in, releasing a follow-up “tutorial” video in which the Lad walked viewers through the choreography while paying tribute to his late “mum.” Both clips became viral fixtures early in the YouTube era, racking up millions of views and spawning a small economy of remixes and mashups across the late 2000s.
By the early 2010s, the Lad had faded into nostalgia bait. It should have ended there.
The TikTok resurrection
On January 12, 2021, podcaster Justin McElroy — of My Brother, My Brother and Me — uploaded the audio of the tutorial dance to TikTok as an original sound, with a low-key invitation for users to make something out of it. Nothing happened. For roughly seven months, the sound sat dormant while McElroy publicly mourned its failure to catch on.
Then, in August 2021, it caught on.
By September, the Berries and Cream sound had been deployed in tens of thousands of TikToks — most of them riffs on the idea that the user, in some specific outfit or hairstyle, looked anachronistically old-fashioned, as if they had wandered out of a different century. The trend’s appeal sat in a sweet spot for the platform: a millennial nostalgia object that doubled as Gen Z absurdist content. The ad’s “uncanny valley” quality — the grown man performing as a child, the costume that placed him outside any identifiable era — translated almost perfectly to the format.
Brands moved fast. Starburst, owned by Mars Wrigley, capitalized within weeks, releasing a Little Lad Halloween costume and quietly bringing the Berries and Creme flavor back to shelves. Shiner Beer floated a Berries and Cream variant. The original creative team appeared on an Advertising Week panel in October 2021 to dissect what had just happened to their 14-year-old ad — and Ferver called in to roast them.
Enter (again) the actor
In September 2021, Ferver, then 42, opened a TikTok account under the handle @thereallittlelad and started posting in character. The videos were loose, unscripted monologues — character bits, hair-care non-sequiturs, ASMR experiments, dirges for “mum.” Within a month the account passed two million followers. Starburst hired Ferver directly for a brand TikTok campaign to coincide with the flavor’s return.
For a brief, very specific window in late 2021, Ferver was inescapable on the algorithm. Then, by design, he stepped back.
The actual job
Here’s the part most of the Little Lad’s TikTok audience never quite registered: Jack Ferver is, and has been for nearly two decades, one of the more critically rated avant-garde choreographers working in New York.
Ferver, who uses they/them pronouns, grew up in Prairie du Sac and Sauk City, Wisconsin — a “little gay kid,” in their own framing, who has spoken openly about the bullying that shaped their later work. They trained at Interlochen Arts Academy before moving to New York at 18, picking up early film roles (Outside Providence in 1999) and TV credits on Strangers with Candy and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. In 2007 — the same year as the Starburst shoot — Ferver began making their own evening-length dance works, starting with When We Were Young and Filled with Fear at Dixon Place.
What followed has been a steady, downtown art-world resume that has almost nothing to do with the candy commercial. Chambre, a collaboration with visual artist Marc Swanson, was nominated for a Bessie Award in 2016. I Want You to Want Me, a “ballet-play” exploring gender and horror, premiered at The Kitchen the same year, supported by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award. Their work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Le Monde and The Financial Times — the New Yorker once described Ferver’s performances as “so extreme that they sometimes look and feel like exorcisms.”
Ferver is an Assistant Professor of Theater and Performance at Bard College, has been guest faculty at NYU Tisch, and has set choreography at The Juilliard School. They co-host the long-running podcast What’s Going On with Dance and Stuff with frequent collaborator Reid Bartelme, the dancer and costume designer who — by Ferver’s account — was the one who pushed them onto TikTok in the first place.
The 2025 lap
If anyone assumed the Little Lad moment would be the last anyone heard of Ferver, the past 18 months have argued the opposite.
In 2025, Ferver choreographed The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, an off-Broadway musical at Signature Theatre Company. In November, their semi-autobiographical solo My Town — a queer dance-theater reimagining of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, structured around a small-town schoolteacher — premiered at NYU Skirball Center and was included in The New York Times’ fall arts roundup. The Times’ Gia Kourlas, reviewing the performance, described the piece as intentionally cryptic and praised it as a feat of sustained storytelling and movement.
Ferver has framed the work in interviews as a return to the trauma and isolation of their Wisconsin childhood — the same material, in other words, that has driven their practice from the beginning, and arguably the same material that the Little Lad accidentally embodied for 30 seconds in 2007. The costume and the manic glee weren’t a one-off bit. They were an early, accidental piece of the same body of work.
The kicker
The internet, periodically, will resurface the Berries and Cream ad and ask, with a kind of theatrical concern, whatever happened to that guy. The honest answer is that nothing happened to him. He went back to the job he was already doing — making rigorous, occasionally violent dance-theater about gender, otherness and childhood pain at one of the better-regarded experimental venues in New York, while teaching the next class of theater majors upstate.
The Little Lad was never a mystery the internet needed to solve. He was a side door into a body of work the algorithm was never really built to see.
