‘He has come back from the dead’: The comedy legend endured eight days in a coma during the health crisis.

Chevy Chase endured a “potentially fatal” cardiac event that resulted in him being placed in an medically induced coma during the pandemic, according to a new film about the entertainment icon.

The film, titled I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the star of movies such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon series, who hosted the Oscars on two occasions, spent a total of five weeks in the medical facility.

“He wasn't right, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we headed to the ER. His heart stopped. During those years he was drinking, he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy; which is when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood out with each beat.”

Doctors then placed him into a state of unconsciousness for more than a week, before warning his daughter, his daughter: “He may not recover. We don’t know how present he’ll be. Get ready for the worst.”

“When he woke up, all he could do was use his voice,” she continued. “He has basically come back from the dead.”

Chase himself has revealed that he has experienced recall difficulties since his hospitalisation, and in the documentary he cannot remember some of his past professional and personal controversies, including a fistfight with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live backstage area.

The comedian noted he was “disappointed” by his absence from the 50th-anniversary show of SNL this year, at which he was in the audience but not on stage.

“To be frank, it was disappointing,” he said. “I haven't spoken about this until now. But I assumed that I should have been on the stage too with all the other actors. When co-stars Garrett Morris and Laraine Newman were called up, I was wondering as to why I was not. 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 accident which precipitated a period of severe depression.