Karachi Vynrz: Hello Dear Readers, we are Karachi Vynz and we make funny videos which are roughly based on general stuff going on in Pakistan.
Our core team members are Mansoor Qureshi and Daniyal Sheikh, the rest of the cast which make the appearance in videos every now and then are Asim Awan, Salman Khan, Shahbaz Khan and Hamza Ahmed. Then there is Azeem Akhter who doesn’t like to stay in the limelight and holds the position of page admin at the moment. Our journey started in November 2014 when Azeem and Mansoor came up with the idea of the page and few initial videos. Daniyal joined a few months later and we did videos which brought us thousands of new fans. We currently have 180K+ likes on our Facebook page and the numbers are growing with every passing day.
Times of Youth: When did you decide that comedy was your calling?
Karachi Vynrz: We started our acting career together well before we created this Facebook Page, the journey roughly started with acting in various (both comedy and serious) plays in Bahria University Dramatics Society which later won us a few awards in different university drama competitions, IBA Youth Festival and Greenwich University to name a few. The reason for sticking with comedy from quite a while is because it is the best medium to not only make an impact on people but also to deliver a message which people can relate to and remember in the long run.
Times of Youth: What was the first reaction of your family members when they heard your decision about being actors?
Karachi Vynrz: Our parents didn’t approve it at first. They thought we were wasting our time with this, but with time as they saw the response and feedbacks our work brought, they finally started supporting us, and now everyone is content with everything.
Times of Youth: What is it about the Karachi culture that made you name your entire vines chain on it?
Karachi Vynrz: The vines culture was brought to Pakistan by a Facebook Page named ‘Pakistan Vines’. They generally did good work but had videos based mainly on Punjab, we liked their work at first but hated the fact that they totally ignored Karachi (Seriously, guys how could you even think of ignoring a city of 2 million people with the most diverse population). We had started our acting career already back then and thought about experimenting with Karachi Vynz. People just loved it!
Times of Youth: Which was your first funny video? How was the response to it?
Karachi Vynrz: Shot from a mobile phone it was a video about the differences between Traffic police in Karachi and elsewhere in Pakistan. The response was not the kind we get these days; few dozens like with a couple of shares and one message encouraging our effort was all we got. It was a very good a start to keep us motivated.
Times of Youth: Did any Lahori ever take offense to your most watched video ‘Lahori’s Common Question’?
Karachi Vynrz: It may come to you as a surprise but people from Lahore actually loved it! That video gave us a massive boost and got us 10K+ likes in a day and many of them were from Lahore. Yes, we did get few negative responses too, but that was negligible.
Times of Youth: Comedians, we hear, especially internet and social media sensations that you are, have a bumpy ride in terms of making a living. How has the journey been so far?
Karachi Vynrz: When we started our journey, neither did we think we would be able to reach this far, nor had any plans of seeking monetary benefits from it. It had certainly not been our plan to earn bread and butter, but with time after the responses we got, it evolved into a full-time job. Although we haven’t got any monetary benefits from the page so far, yet we have been approached by quite a few brands lately, and if things go well, we will see how bumpy the ride actually is.
Times of Youth: Any particular work of yours which you cherish the most?
Karachi Vynrz: Our work ‘Aao Bachpan Yaad Karte Hain’ made many people nostalgic about those golden days of their childhood. Imagine what it did to us when we were compiling its script and working on the video, we relived our childhood while working on it.
Times of Youth: So which are your new projects that we should watch out for?
Karachi Vynrz: We are working on something big, the details of which we cannot reveal yet. But apart from that, we have a bunch of videos lined up and also looking for highlighting social issues and delivering messages through some serious videos.
Times of Youth: What makes you come up with so many ideas with such enormous potential to crack up anyone?
Karachi Vynrz: Ideas come randomly. When odds are against you, you think long and hard about something worth working on and end up wasting that day. But when it is your day, you finalize many ideas in one single sitting. Today was one such day; Mansoor, Daniyal, and Azeem met at a Chai Dhaba for a couple of hours and the meeting ended with finalizing 6 ideas of quality videos which we already know are going to make it big. You have to be good at observing everything to come up with ideas which everyone can relate to in their lives.
Times of Youth: Tell us something funny.
Karachi Vynrz: If at first, you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.
Times of Youth: Has your work ever been criticized? How did you handle it?
Karachi Vynrz: We appreciate constructive criticism. We believe it actually helps us improve and get an insight of what people are expecting from us. We learn more from criticism than praises that we get for our content. People expect quality content from us and when they feel we are below par somewhere, they have a right to criticize. But then there are people who criticize just for the heck of it. We used to come up with explanations and asked them not to take offense, but we don’t care about them anymore.
We like this quote from the movie Social Network- “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.”
Times of Youth: Plagiarism, nowadays, is commonplace. Have you guys ever been its victim? What do you want to say to those who steal ideas to be famous?
Karachi Vynrz: Not quite as much for us. We have already made it big in Pakistan (Alhamdulillah), and if someone steals ideas from our videos, people watching them will know where it came from. There had been instances when few pages posted our videos under their name with our tags stripped, but it was us in the video and people knew anyway.
It is totally unethical and immoral to copy ideas without giving credits. One may fluke and get likes on videos based on copied ideas, but people will know eventually and they will lose the trust people have in them unless they come up with original ideas.
Times of Youth: What has been the most unforgettable experience in your journey of spreading smiles?
Karachi Vynrz: Dozens of people message us every day praising our efforts and telling us about how we made them smile after an exhausting day at work, or how someone stumbled upon one video and ended up watching all of them. We want to let everyone know that this is what keeps us motivated to do what we are doing.
We were invited by students of DMC for a charity event lately. We decided to be there for half an hour, but the response we got from the people there was so overwhelming that we had to stay for more than two hours. There were more than 200 fans who took selfies with us, and the kind of appreciation and recognition we got was truly unforgettable.
Times of Youth: What advice would you give to the young upcoming comedians who still have a long way to go?
Karachi Vynrz: Persistency is the key lads; keep working hard, and when you find out what works for you and what doesn’t, making it big will just be a matter of time.
Times of Youth: Do tell us how fans can contact you to share their appreciation and feedback.
Karachi Vynrz: If you look closely, there is a message button on our Facebook page. We read every single message and try to reply most of them.
