In above segment, Dave drops item off a five-story tower. While entertaining, it’s important to note the context of when this was filmed. His show did this in 1984, on network television, albeit well after midnight. There were way fewer sources of entertainment back then compared to now. There were only three national TV networks and obviously no Internet and thus no YouTube nor streaming services. TV was downright boring at times just because you just couldn’t afford to screw around on a national network. A majority of TV shows were safe and you didn’t get a lot of weird stuff on TV. So for Dave to devote several minutes of national TV to just throwing crap off a building was quite visionary and unusual at the time.
I will point out that the various YouTube channels that exist today where people put things into a hydraulic press, destroys things while filming with a high speed camera, cutting through things with a red-hot knife, and so forth, all those popular videos, Dave was doing that kind of stuff back in early 1980s. He, his writers, and his staff have a legacy that will be hard to match in the history late-night television.