I love you as New Englanders love pie!

The line is a comic simile: it measures affection by comparing it to a stereotypically hearty regional appetite—New Englanders’ supposed love of pie. The humor comes from its homely, domestic reference (pie as comfort food) and from the exaggerated certainty implied by invoking a cultural cliché. Read this way, the speaker’s “I love you” is both sincere and playfully deflating, replacing lofty romantic language with something plainspoken and everyday. If genuinely by Marquis, it would fit his broader tendency toward wry, vernacular wit and affectionate satire of American manners.