'The Daily Show' Responds to 1D Fans

Another hashtag about another maybe-racist-may-not late night comedy news show joke exploded onto the interwebs Friday. #TheDailyShowGoneTooFar started trending on Twitter after The Daily Show's Jessica Williams made a joke on Tuesday's episode that was misinterpreted as lumping in One Directioner Zayn Malik in with terrorists due to his Pakistani and Muslim background. Now The Daily Show has responded One Direction fans via the show's Twitter account mainly using the "whoa, we promise we knew nothing about this boy band" defense.

Here's the initial joke:

Just as you were talking, a new terrorist group formed with one member each from ISIS, al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, Hamas, One Direction, and the Zetas drug cartel.

And here's the response The Daily Show made on Twitter after everything went viral:

Dear 1D fans: We didn't know the band members' names, religions, hobbies, etc. Just knew they were popular. But not THIS popular. #whoa

Is this an acceptable response? Personally, I find this to be a perfectly acceptable response, but then again, unlike tons of Directioners, I wasn't particularly mad about any of this in the first place. Will some One Direction fans accept this and move on? Probably. Will some continue to hold a grudge and add this incident to the list of reasons The Daily Show/every human being who isn't in One Direction is against them? Probs. You win some, you lose some. And this doesn't particularly seem like either. These two groups — Daily Show staff and One Direction fans — rarely cross paths, and probably won't again anyway.