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I've always had a hard time immediately understanding the differences between
passive, causative, and causative-passive. If I really sit down and try to
work out the meaning I can generally get it, but I have a bad habit of just
skimming over it.

One verb that is giving me trouble is 笑う:

The passive is 笑われる, or "to be laughed at". This seems pretty straight-
forward.

> たけしさんはメアリーさんによく笑われます。 Takeshi is often laughed at by Mary.

The causative is 笑わせる, or "to make laugh, to let laugh". Again, this makes
sense to me.

> 彼は子供達を笑わせた。 He made the children laugh.

What I don't understand is the the causative-passive, 笑わせられる. My understanding
of it is that it follows the pattern of "is made to do", that someone is made
to do something that they don't want to do. But how does this work with
laughter? It seems to me that this is the same meaning as "being made to
laugh". The only other thing I can think of is "was made to laugh at someone",
like in a peer-pressure sort of situation.

Take this JLPT practice question:

> △△さんの冗談には、いつも思わず **笑わせられた** 。

The wrong answers include 笑われた, and 笑わせた.

Why is the answer the causative-passive (せられた), and not the causative (せた)?
What is the difference in meaning? Is the causative out-right wrong here, or
is it just less-right or natural then the causative-passive? Is there a clue
in the sentence structure that I'm missing?
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grammar nuances conjugations
Help with the difference between causative and the causative-passive for the verb 笑う
It's the joke that made you laugh...

The に of 冗談には indicates what made you laugh, but you _can't_ say

> 冗談が私を笑わせた。

since 冗談 can't make people laugh actively. (Which is different from English.
Compare [this](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/6788/1628) answer of mine
about the difference of usage of the passive in Japanese and English.)

In some sense, the sentence above would be more complete as

> 私は◯さんの冗談に(は)いつも思わず笑わせられた。

but sounds less natural, because you are stating a subject, which should
already be obvious (see Tsuyoshi Ito's comment below).
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2012-09-20T15:03:47.537
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In the sentence, "`△△さんの冗談には、いつも思わず笑わせられた。`", "`笑わせられた`" has a nuance "I could
not resist △△'s jokes". The sentence implies the jokes were really good.
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answer