A caricaturist is a person who makes caricatures: drawings — or, less often, pieces of writing — that copy a real person but stretch the truth. A huge chin, tiny glasses, a walk made ridiculous, so you laugh, or so you see the person in a sharp new way. Street artists who sketch tourists with giant heads are caricaturists; so are newspaper artists who poke fun at politicians. The word is neutral to slightly formal. It is not the same as a comic-book artist, though actually the line can get blurry: a caricaturist is aiming at a real face and a real trait, not building a wholly made-up hero.