The research aimed to analyze the incidence of popular theater in the strengthening of social humor as a coping strategy in urban violence scenarios. The participants were 50 people who live in the Sol de Oriente and Cementerio neighborhoods from the commune number 10 from Pasto, southwestern Colombia. The study was framed within the qualitative paradigm, with a social critical approach and under the orientation of the research - action method. Among the main findings it is found that the participants recognize the social humor as an effective coping strategy, and from that perspective different strategies of solution to the phenomenon of urban violence are generated; the habitants create and strengthen support net resignify collective social facts and face social stressors. As a conclusion, popular theater allows the community to recover effective coping capacity in the urban violence phenomenon, and constitutes itself in a community tool for the dynamization of community resources that allows the re- establishment of the locus of social control and repositioning of local actors with higher levels of collective self-efficacy.