In May, 2017, while performing a standup set during a comedy night at the Bardot Café, in Philadelphia, the comedian Jason Weems had an asthma attack. It was a bad one. A few minutes after he left the stage, he lost consciousness. “I knew he had kids,” a bystander says in the podcast “First Day Back.” “I was like, Am I watching somebody’s dad die?” Weems was effectively dead for several minutes—no pulse, no breathing—but, incredibly, he survived. Now he’s navigating his return to comedy. In each season of “First Day Back,” Tally Abecassis, the podcast’s creator, producer, and host, chronicles the story of a person returning from a life-changing event. The first season was about Abecassis herself, a Montreal-based documentary filmmaker, returning to work after a long maternity leave; the second was about Lucie, a woman from rural Ontario who returns to home life after prison and the tragic killing that put her there. This season is about Weems, a comedian…
