As the sound of laughs and shouts echo off the walls of the HUB-Robeson Center Saturday night, one distinct noise filters through the mess -- the scratching of a thick black sharpie as it flies wildly over paper.

It's Saturday night at Late Night Penn State and Chip Mock is drawing caricatures as an activity.

"I get to make fun of people and they thank me," he said. "How can you not enjoy it?"

A video camera sits above his right shoulder capturing every stroke of his black-and-white caricatures. Since the camera is connected to a television, students who are waiting in line for their turn can watch his work in progress.

"It's a whole different perspective on how you look," Elizabeth Hammel (senior-advertising) said. She admitted she was a little nervous about posing. "You never know what you're gonna look like."

Mock, a State College resident, has been drawing caricatures for 25 years. He's been a Late Night participant once a month since it started in 1996.

"I exaggerate everything. The funnier looking you are, the greater character you are to draw," he said with a laugh.

Mock said he's been developing and improving his technique the whole time. He's even changed which part of the face he draws first.

"The nose is the center of the universe," he said. He said he follows it by drawing the mouth and then the eyes. Then he fills in the rest of the face.

But, he added, one thing that has not changed is his willingness to make fun of people. After all, that is the nature of caricatures.

"If I feel as we're talking that you can take it, I'm gonna push it. If I'm sitting here staring at you, you know I'm destroying you," he said with a laugh.

And he's quick.

"Up here at the HUB when I get cookin' I draw about 40 people an hour if not more," he said.

He said he draws most caricatures in one-and-a-half to two minutes. And despite the quick pace of his drawings, he said he rarely gets tired.

"I'm like a trained athlete. I do this a lot," Mock said, adding that he can do five to six jobs in a weekend.

He's even won an award from the National Caricaturist Network (NCN) for his speed. In 1998, he won third place for fastest caricaturist. He also won third place in the black-and-white caricatures category of 197 people.

"We take our craft very serious," Mock said. "We make fun of people but we want to be good at it."

He said membership in the NCN and the regular photographs he takes of his works are great ways to critique and improve his art.

And it is art, Mock said, despite the fact that he has had some festival artists say his work is not art because people could buy caricatures at an amusement park.

"I'm as much of an artist if not more of an artist than these craft people," he said.

Hammel's friends, Susannah Oberdorf (senior-advertising) and Matthew Ginnard (junior-communication arts and sciences), said Mock's caricature of the trio will be one they will always remember.

"I look like I'm 80," Hammel said.

"I look like I'm 10," Oberdorf countered. "And I like that I don't have any eyebrows," she said with a laugh.

Mock smiled, took a picture of the group with their caricature, and moved on to the next person.