During a recent episode of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, an audience member asked the host for his views on l’affaire Liam Neeson. The well-known actor recently admitted to a journalist that a friend of his was raped by a black man and that after the crime he was on the lookout for “any” black man on the street to get into a brawl with and eventually kill.

Noah has always been very vocal about racism, but he took a somewhat softer stand on Neeson. Trevor Noah said that the reportage in the issue has been about “what he said but it’s technically not what he was saying”. Nuance was the keyword i Noah’s response.

Noah, however, said that comments made by Neeson later, where he tries to sell himself as “not racist”, don’t hold ground. “The fact that you thought that you can go out and kill any black man for what a black man did is a form of racism,” he averred.