You can, but have to be willing to jump through flaming hoops of fire and so on.

an entire ignition can be wired up and laid on a bench, all the way to 8 spark plugs, the distributor can be spun by hand or gently placed in a vise
and spun with a drill motor, spark can then be observed on the bench for every cylinder. This is good for puzzling situations where everything else has failed.
If the spark looks like weak orange junk, that's exactly what it is and it needs to be fixed.

Alternately, before the last step of priming, with the distributor out of the engine, you can take a spare plug wire, attach a spark plug, run that to your
coil tower out of the coil, turn the ignition on, spin the distributor by hand and observe the spark. This ensures the entire primary circuit of the ignition functions, and takes the secondary side of the ignition on faith (this is how I do it when reasonably confident the cap rotor and wires are ok).

You'll encounter many who will say this kind of thing is ridiculous, they're usually the same folks who crank the engine for an hour, eventually find the error and get the engine running, then months later blame the cam when it goes flat.

As far as the carb goes....with the carb suspended/not sitting on a bench, fill the bowls manually through the bowl vents, hold the butterflies wide open and blow 100psi or so compressed air through the barrels with a basic air nozzle. Do this for a fraction of a second and observe. You should be able to see fuel being pulled through the booster venturi. Assuming you can, the carb will generally work well enough to at least run on the main metering circuit. It may not "run well" but with the throttle open sufficiently it can get you through break in. (Put out your Marlboro Red when doing this. Smoking is bad.) Bolt the carb on the engine after that.

Many might be surprised to hear you can start an engine with no carburetor at all, nothing but a squirt bottle of fuel and the right touch.
The problem with this is, rpm is not controllable. It is strictly a junkyard/salvage engine "must hear it run" kind of a test only good for a second or two.

Many might be surprised that 20+ minutes straight is totally not necessary AS LONG AS the engine fires right up easily.
Instead, you can do 3 to 5 minutes at a time, avoid getting anything hot, and also establish the desired wear pattern on an antiquated flat tappet
setup with a whole lot less stress, and plenty of opportunities to take care of any issues that come up.