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

Chevy Chase experienced a “potentially fatal” heart failure that caused him being placed in an medically induced coma in 2021, per details from a new documentary project about the comedy star.

As documented 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, remained in care for five full weeks in the hospital.

“Something was wrong, and he was unable to describe to me what was wrong. So, we went to the ER. His heart stops. 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.”

Physicians subsequently induced him into a coma for more than a week, before warning his daughter, Caley: “His return is uncertain. We are unsure how present he’ll be. Get ready for the worst.”

“Upon waking, all he could do was use his voice,” she added. “He has essentially come back from the dead.”

He himself has said that he has experienced recall difficulties since his medical ordeal, and in the documentary he fails to recall some of his past on-set and backstage disputes, including a fight with fellow comedian Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live dressing room.

Chase said he was “hurt” by his absence from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL earlier this year, at which he was in attendance but not participating.

“Well, it was kind of upsetting actually,” he said. “I'm only now voicing this. But I expected that I could have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When co-stars Garrett Morris and Laraine took the stage, I was wondering as to why I was not. No one asked me to. Why was I excluded?”

Chase, 82, nearly lost his life in 1980 when he was subjected to an electrical shock on the set of Modern Problems, an accident which triggered a period of severe depression.