“I’m most looking forward to the group showers at truck stops at 3 a.m.,” says Katherine Marty, a 28-year-old stripteasing, dancing, acting, fire playing, hula hooping member of SHFT.

More important than communal shower time, the members of Super Happy Funtime hope to kick start some national notoriety by taking their always off-color and sometimes controversial variety show on the road this August.

Most of the 22 cast members, band members and crew will take to the road to expand the show’s repertoire from its current three to four statewide shows per month to a string of 25 shows across the country.

“The evolving entertainment industry is moving at such a pace that we have to take the next step to operate and sustain as the market goes through this tectonic shift,” says Corey Ruffin, also known as Mr. Happy Pants, the songwriter, ringmaster, lead musician and host of SHFT. “Everything we’re doing is to stay outside of the unpredictable disaster taking place in the record industry.”

The group began raising the $15,000 necessary to get them across the country and back via the all-or-nothing fundraising site Kickstarter in April, and it has until July 13 to meet its goal.

“It’s suicide if we don’t raise that money up front,” says Ruffin. “If we don’t hit the number, no one is charged and no one goes on tour.”

The cast and crew members will put their careers and families on hold in hopes that the risk of the tour will translate into greater notoriety and a more diverse fan base. Most of the members work as various breeds of freelance artists, which gives them the freedom to take a month off.

“It’s all about progress and being able to look behind you and see that you’re further ahead than you were last year,” says Ruffin. “I don’t want to be that dude in his 50s who’s playing guitar at a dive bar on a Thursday night.”

A handful of the current members have been with the group since the beginning, when they performed in coffee shops under the even more-than-a-mouthful moniker of Dr. Toledo’s Magical Elixir Traveling Medicine Show. Their first appearance as SHFT came during a private party in the backyard of a Grand Rapids home, with an audience of 400 in front of the flatbed truck they used as a stage.

“When we started, we were doing all different kinds of shows,” Ruffin said. “We did comedy, film, concerts and 24-hour theatre, but burlesque was the only one anyone came to because there were naked people.”

Burlesque, the satirical variety show genre that features scantily clad performers and stripteases, began in the 1800s as a way to challenge social norms. The performance art form, billed as “sexy musical comedy theatre” by SHFT, has enjoyed a national revival in recent years.

Two months after its flatbed burlesque performance, SHFT began monthly appearances at the Sazerac Lounge. The shows consisted of a loose collection of skits and performances, with dance, comedy and other variety acts that were rehearsed and performed as separate scenes. Each member had creative freedom in creating their act, and quickly learned how to keep an audience entertained.

“I’ve made misguided choices in terms of the kind of acts I’ve done, where I thought they’d work on stage and they just didn’t,” says Marty. “I had a high concept number to an instrumental song, where I smeared myself with ashes and splashed with myself with water. I thought it was all very apocalyptic … but no one knew what I was doing or why I was doing it.”

The formula has since morphed into a more cohesive group production, with extravagant, theatrical elements, original music and a scripted story arc rather than a set list. SHFT outgrew its space at Sazerac, but found a new home at Wealthy Theatre, performing a science fiction-themed burlesque odyssey and a Christmas special for sold out crowds.

“A lot of shows coast by finding a formula and sticking with it. They don’t,” says Erin Wilson, the theatre manager at Wealthy Theatre. “It’s original from top to bottom.”

SHFT staged “ArtPrize: The Musical” last fall, which featured a pasty-clad Marty convincing Ruffin’s Mr. Happy Pants to enter ArtPrize. After grabbing a nearby coat rack and telling Rachel Finan’s newsboy character to secure a venue for his “sculpture,” Ruffin launched into songs and dialogue lampooning Young Kim, Jacqueline Gilmore, The BOB and voters, among others.

“This ‘Bob’ must be a cultural Mecca … a place where artists meet in harmony and optimism to exchange fresh and new ideas. To join hands together to work and create something of immense beauty! It must be the complete antitheses of all the loser chatch bars downtown,” Ruffin exclaimed onstage, as the Wealthy Theatre crowd erupted into raucous cheers and applause.

It wouldn’t be a burlesque show if the performance didn’t end with the female cast members stripping down to their pasties. Finan and Ruffin encouraged the audience to adorn themselves with the pasties located under their seats and join them in the final song and dance number.

“It’s kind of amazing that we basically birthed these deranged musicals,” says Marty.

“I give a lot of credit to Corey because he changed it from a hootenanny to a bona fide live theatre production,” Wilson said. “People who have seen it over the years notice the transition.”

But it wasn’t always this easy. When asked about past controversies, Ruffin becomes increasingly animated. He recalls an early performance at Sazerac, when police raided the bar after being tipped off that the show included nudity and, allegedly, a live sex show with caged animals.

“There were calls into the police because people didn’t know what we did,” Ruffin said. “Would we really have a live sex show at a family bar and restaurant?”

Brett Alward, owner of the Sazerac Lounge, says the police were performing their due diligence after seeing phony SHFT fliers promoting bestiality and caged animals at Meijer and downtown around the police station.

“Right after their show had ended, at least 10 officers swarmed in through the back and front doors, almost blitzkrieg style,” says Alward. “I walked them through the basement, through the coolers, my office, even the closet under the staircase. It was like they were searching for a chained individual under the steps.”

After that incident, SHFT began to research exactly what they could and could not do onstage. Ruffin says that as soon as they began producing shows on a larger scale at Wealthy Theatre, they faced even more critics who made sure the group dotted their I’s and crossed their T’s at all times.

“There was a bit of anxiety about this ‘thing,’” Wilson said. “If anybody did anything that appeared to cross a line, we’d quickly be visited by the proper authorities and figure out what we had to do differently.”

No one was ever prosecuted or fined as a result of the complaints, but the experience gave Ruffin a new perspective on freedom of speech.

“I never cared about free speech because I never thought it would happen to me,” he said. “But we were being suppressed by someone we didn’t know and had never met. It became a very passionate battle for about two years.”

While detractors focused on fire code violations or other obscure ordinances, Ruffin believes most of the uproar stemmed from a cultural fear of a nude form.

“Any negative reaction has been based on fear,” he said. “People hear that there’s nudity in the show and they’re terrified of the content and the power of taking clothes off. It’s entirely harmless, but for some reason it’s perceived as dangerous.”

Marty, who says her specialty is taking off her clothes, dabbled in local theater and art modeling before joining SHFT at the end of 2006. She views it as a way to express herself and find the creative freedom that she says was lacking in community theatre.

Marty says being on stage nearly nude, performing a striptease down to pasties and panties, has never been an issue for her. When asked how she responds to critics who call her a stripper, she deadpans, “I’m not a stripper because I can’t move my ass cheeks individually. And I’ve heard pole dancing is very difficult.”

Both Marty and Ruffin are quick to point out that burlesque doesn’t exploit the female form, but instead focuses on theatrical art with sexuality as the method of expression.

“Burlesque makes people nervous because we’re not strippers,” Marty says. “We’re insisting on owning our sexuality and using it to say something else. We’re using it to be funny, aggressive, provide social or political commentary, poke fun at the community or be satirical. And that’s more threatening than the simple transaction of a girl who wants money for a lap dance.

“A burlesque dance is sexual but it’s ‘sexy and … There’s always something else going on, usually humor. Strip clubs are not rife with comedy, but a funny burlesque dance will take you a long way.”

As SHFT has grown more widely accepted and understood in West Michigan, the detracting voices have quieted to a nearly inaudible whisper. It’s almost to a point where SHFT might be reenergized by taking its show on the road and making some noise in other cities.

“We’ve hit a ceiling in this town,” Ruffin said. “After five years, tons of people know who we are, but only 600 or so are committed toactually seeing the thing.”

It’s anyone’s guess how this bawdy show will fare when it rolls into small cities such as Lubbock, Texas, Sioux Falls, S.D., and Salt Lake City, Utah, but Ruffin is confident that it will translate loud and clear in the cities they’ve chosen to invade.

“We definitely do better in conservative cities where there’s a counterculture brimming under the surface,” says Ruffin, citing well-received past performances in Holland and St. Joseph. “This is something different, it’s against the norm. There’s a tinge of danger, which intrigues people.”

Ruffin doesn’t necessarily view the tour as a stepping stone to becoming a full-time touring act, and is hesitant to predict the next stage in the evolution of SHFT.