‘He was brought back from the edge’: The comedy legend was in eight days in a medically induced coma during the health crisis.

Chevy Chase suffered a “life-threatening” cardiac event that resulted in him being put into an induced coma in 2021, according to a new documentary project about the American actor and comedian.

Featured in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the legend of films such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who emceed the Oscars twice, was hospitalized for five full weeks in the hospital.

“Something was wrong, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we go to the ER. His heart stopped. During those years he was drinking, he got cardiomyopathy; which is when the heart muscles get weaker, and they are unable to pump as much blood out with each beat.”

Medical professionals then put him into a state of unconsciousness for over a week, before cautioning his daughter, Caley: “We might not get him back. We don’t know how present he’ll be. You must prepare for the worst.”

“After regaining consciousness, all he was able to do was use his voice,” she added. “He has practically been resurrected.”

The actor personally has revealed that he has suffered memory problems since his hospitalisation, and in the documentary he does not recollect some of his past on-set and backstage controversies, including a fistfight with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live green room.

Chase said he was “disappointed” by his omission from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL earlier this year, at which he was in the audience but not on stage.

“To be frank, it was disappointing,” he said. “I'm only now voicing this. But I assumed that I could have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When former castmates Garrett and Laraine Newman went on the stage, I was puzzled as to why I wasn't. No one asked me to. Why was I excluded?”

Now 82, Chase, nearly lost his life in 1980 when he was electrocuted on the set of Modern Problems, an incident which precipitated a period of depression.