Passives are not hard to interpret but hard to remember:Evidence from online and offline studies.Passive sentences are considered more difficult to comprehend than active sentences.Previous online-only studies cast doubt on this generalization. The current paper directly compares online and offline processing of passivization and manipulates verb type: state vs. event. Stative passives are temporarily ambiguous (adjectival vs. verbal), eventive passives are not (always verbal). Across 4 experiments (self-paced reading with comprehension questions), passives were consistently read faster than actives. This contradicts the claim that passives are difficult to parse and/or interpret, as argued by main perspectives of passive processing (heuristic, syntactic, frequentist). The reading time facilitation is compatible with broader expectation/surprisal theories. When comprehension targeted theta-role assignment, passives were more errorful, regardless of verb type. Verbal WM measures correlated with the difference in accuracy, but not online measures. The accuracy effect is argued to reflect a post-interpretive difficulty associated with maintaining/manipulating the passive representation as required by specific tasks. difficulty on offline tasks that require a judgment of a sentence interpretation (Ferreira, 2003; Street & Dąbrowska, 2010), but no difficulty or even facilitation on online ones that measure the moment-to-moment processing of sentences (Carrithers, 1989;Traxler, Corina, Morford, Hafer & Hoversten, 2014). While the offline data seem consistent with the general tenet that passives are more complex than actives, the online data question it. However, these previous studies collected either online or offline measures preventing definite conclusions to be drawn on the possible reason(s) for their contrasting data.In filling this gap, we present four self-paced reading experiments that simultaneously collected comprehension accuracy data with healthy adults. Results were replicated across 4 experiments, confirming an online vs. offline dissociation and at significance: passives were processed faster than actives at the verb and through much of the by-phrase, but induced more comprehension errors. This picture is inconsistent with the view that passives are more complex than actives. The fourth experiment supports a role for Working Memory (WM) in the accuracy effect. We argue that the complexity observed in offline data are due to postinterpretive processes required of the task and that noncanonical sentences (i.e., passives) are not complex to parse and interpret.